Video still from "Saffron Tea

By Ashlee Fairey

Though it has been three years since Bahar Behbahani created her short film “Suspended” and she has made several video works since, it was still the film she chose to cue up in her airy apartment/art studio in Brooklyn on a recent April day. The film faded up into a sepia scene: a brick house with a curtained window and a back porch, a bicycle nestled in the corner. It could be a snapshot straight out of an old family album, except everything is upside down.

The screen gently sways like a rope-swing from which someone has just leapt. A woman comes into the screen, dangling upside down as children often hang from monkey bars, and as notes from a music box chime out, the woman closes her eyes as if in deep reverie. As the camera pulls back, we see that this woman’s feet are not hooked round a bar but are bound by rope, her arms limp by her ears as she twists with the wind, and the silent suggestion of death creeps in. The scene has a stillness that often permeates sleep, but it’s unclear whether this would be a dream or a nightmare.

As the film ended, Behbahani walked over to the stove and poured herself another glass of black tea, the kind she drinks when she visits her family back in Iran. “When you move from your home and your country, and when it’s very far geographically, you can’t really..I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like a dream,” Behbahani said slowly, softly, letting the tea’s steam cup her face. “Sometimes when I sleep, I don’t know if I’m in sleep or I’m awake. And when I’m awake, I have vice versa feeling. Sometimes you think, maybe it’s not real. Maybe I’m still there.”

The world’s art market has been fascinated with contemporary Iranian art recently. In 2006, for the first time, Christie’s included modern and contemporary Arab and Iranian art in its International Modern and Contemporary Art auction; the section almost tripled its presale estimates and brought in $2.2 million. Just a year later, another Christie’s auction of Arab and Iranian art realized $18 million. Since then, numerous shows of contemporary Iranian art have been showing in New York, London, Paris and Dubai. “There are times when certain things become popular, and certain artwork becomes relevant, fortunately or unfortunately,” said Liam Derik van Loenen, director of the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York. “There is a current phenomenon of dealing with Iran.”

Bahar Behbahani is  a contemporary painter and video-artist from Iran, but she manages to elude the limiting category of “Iranian Artist.” She is, simply, an artist. “She’s not shying away from issues involving living across two different cultures,” van Loenen said, but those themes stem not from a desire to highlight her nationality but from an artistic impulse for self-expression.

“With a lot of Iranian art – not all, but with a lot – there is a tendency to try to please and be beautiful,” said Anahita Varzi, director of the Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery, a New York gallery that specializes in contemporary Iranian art. “You can tell it is something that is supposed to speak to the collector and be something that you want to take and hang and, I don’t want to say decorate, but place in your home and have it look fabulous. [Behbahani] is definitely not an artist who is out there for that reason.”

Though it was her art that originally brought her to the Unites States, there was never a precise moment when Behbahani, now 37, decided to make the move. “If you decided to move to another country and it’s clear for you, you are focused,” she said in a gentle tone, brushing aside her curly black hair that nears the small of her back. At 5 feet tall, her presence is petite and unassuming, but her wide brown eyes exude a hypnotic intensity. “You know, ok, that was my past, this is my present and this is my future. In my case, I never say I decided that. I just go with the flow and things are just happening by accident. I didn’t want to come to America.” It just somehow happened.

In 2002, Behbahani, an emerging painter, traveled from Tehran to Geneva to attend an art show in which her paintings were hanging. It was meant to be a brief stay, but her cousins in Boston convinced her to visit. Two weeks into her Boston visit, she learned some of her work was to be included in a travelling show of Iranian art that was to start in D.C and move to Vermont, Atlanta and Florida. The curators asked her to tag along, and after great deliberation, she agreed. In Atlanta, she had her first major sale, and after that, she kept extending her return ticket home. She told herself she would stay a little bit longer, and then go home.

Behbahani did return to Tehran in 2003, but only to visit: She had at that point settled in D.C. There were moments though, when she almost forgot where she was. When visiting New York one night, her friend took her to an Iranian dance party. Soon after arriving, she saw flashing lights and heard the police barge into the club after receiving a noise complaint. It was exactly as if she was back in Tehran, and the Basiji of the Revolutionary Guard were bursting into the party. Out of habit, she frantically looked for a place to hide her beer.

Though Behbahani still travels between Iran and the U.S. to see family and pursue artistic projects, she now lives in a luminous studio in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, where she moved in 2007.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, sunlight infused the drawn canvas curtains, creating a spectral glow. The only light to penetrate the windows fell directly on the neat rows of paint tubes lining the sill. The apartment is kept tidy and clean, save for the magenta splotches by the painting corner, staining the hardwood floors. Completed canvases were neatly stacked against the wall two feet deep and up to the high ceiling, and cardboard tubes crowded doorway corners.

It was lunchtime. The smell of sizzling garlic wafted through the apartment as Behbahani sprinkled rosemary, lemon juice and red saffron over chicken and prunes, which she would serve with quinoa and peas. Before leaving Iran, cooking never held any appeal for her, but she found soon after moving to the States that preparing a meal had a calming effect. “It’s like meditation,” she said, moving the chicken breasts around with a fork. “It’s cozy, like home. Some smells go back to memories.” Above the stove hung an earthenware jug painted with a picture of her parents the year she was born.

“Sam, lunch!” she called out to her friend. Feeding people in her home feels natural, just as the women of her family filled their tables with food. “People in the West see cooking as a symbol of repression, as serving men,” she said as she set the table. “But we [Iranians] think it’s a power to run and control the family. We are feeding, and that doesn’t mean we are anti-feminist.”

While some of Behbahani’s attitudes will remain forever Iranian, others fluctuate depending on which city she’s in. When in New York, she respects people’s personal space; when in Tehran, she jostles people on the street and elbows people in line. In New York, she feels people are too cold; in Tehran, she feels things are dysfunctional. “There’s no balance,” she said, drifting somewhere between the two cultures.

Moving from Tehran to New York and leaving behind family, friends and cultural customs inspired an important work of art. “I was in the process of thinking that whatever you experience or go through, either it’s bothering or painful or it’s pleasing or joyful, you get used to it.” As with all her ideas, this concept came to her with a color: green. It also came in a specific medium, and for the first time in her artistic career, that medium was a short film.

She was not entirely new to video: Behbahani, in collaboration with Iranian painter and filmmaker Pooya Aryanpour, made five documentary films about the lives of Iranian artists over the span of two years, starting in 2000. For her first short video artwork, however, she assembled a cameraman, sound designer and producer, and translated her vision to the screen. “You Get Used To It” (2005) opens with a triptych: the center frame shows a woman standing in green, leaf-flecked water. On either side, the frames focus on the floating leaves and the insects crawling on them. Behbahani often uses diptychs and triptychs in her work: it allows her to present multiple perspectives. “I like to have two or three..not variety but narrations of an event at the same time, because it’s my practice in life that nothing is fixed, and when you say, ‘This is happened like this,’ someone else explains it other way.”

Behbahani often finds inspiration in the natural world. “Nature changes. It experiences death, life, youth, age,” she explained. It was after the death of her father when she became hyper-aware of the changing season. The air was getting cooler, the days shorter. Life was moving on, and you get used it. As a child, Behbahani played in the garden pools of her home in Tehran, watching the insects struggling to swim through the green water. Sometimes she rescued them, sometimes she drowned them. “You think it’s a ridiculous struggle,” she said. “The beetle wants to go to this leaf, to that leaf, but for him, it’s life and death. I wanted to confront a human being and the struggle she thinks she’s got.”

Since her first foray into video art, Behbahani has made two additional films: “Suspended” (2007) and “Saffron Tea” (2008). Carrie Springer, senior curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum, named “Suspended” Best in Show at the 13th Annual International Exhibition of Women’s Art in New York. The film went on to show at The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and a year later, was accepted into the Tribecca Film Festival.

Springer was captivated by Behbahani’s strong artistic voice, and the hanging figure in “Suspended,” which for her indicated Behbahani’s mastery of subtly blending the personal and the political. Springer also nominated Behbahani’s “Suspended” photographs that were ultimately included in the Bruce Silverstein Gallery’s 2010 Photography Annual.

The film’s theme of being suspended between homeland and current country, childhood and the present, dreaming and waking, serenity and eeriness, is carried through in “Saffron Tea.” Much of the film is out of focus and overexposed, so objects appear as shimmering lines of light and figures seem to hover like ghosts. Ephemeral wisps of color curl through the air like smoke, and the viewer can faintly make out an armchair, a platter of fruit, women fanning themselves in a sitting room.

Video still from "Saffron Tea"

Flashes of a home movie fade in and out while a child’s voice chatters. Yet these memories are merely fleeting fragments of a distant world. There is a yearning undertone to the film, but when a young woman appears, she is submerged in a tank of water, unable to flick a fan or pluck a grape. Just as in “Suspended,” the work’s quiet serenity is challenged by the eerie possibility of death, be it hanging or drowning. The tranquility Behbahani offers is always shadowed by doubt.

For “Saffron Tea,” Behbahani brought her friend and fellow video artist Sam Nosratian on as producer. Nosratian first met her six years ago while visiting a friend in D.C. “She’s definitely a lot more intense than I first thought, and a lot more serious than even my first impression,” he said. “You look at her and she’s this cute little girl, but she’s really, really tough.” When he came to her apartment for appetizers before going out, he was struck by the décor. The table was nicely set with candles lit, every detail attended to. “It was very, intensely nice. You know with Americans, you go over to their house for a drink and everything is much more relaxed, but with her everything was really intense, like we’re going to enjoy this moment. She’s very serious even about that.”

Behbahani and Nosratian share a love for tea, a distain for TV and an obsession with work. Though Nosratian is staying with Behbahani while they edit their new film, they don’t see much of each other – when working on videos, they each are focused on their computer screens. “You have to convince her there’s a good reason for her to go out and have coffee, otherwise she’s going to choose to work,” Nosratian said.

Though he admires her dedication, when he produces her videos, her fastidiousness drives him crazy. “She’s so fucking demanding. After “Saffron Tea” I fucking hated her,” he said. “No joke, I just hated her, I wanted to kill her.” After the film was finished, Nosratian vowed never to produce her work again. A year later, he was back onboard, working on her current, untitled work-in-progress.

While she can be relentless and uncompromising, Nosratian says, her perfectionism truly begets perfection. “I recognize her as one of the best artists of my time. Society hasn’t recognized that yet. I feel privileged to be part of her work.” He observes the reactions of curators and collectors as they view her work, and notes how their attitudes shift from indifferent to fascinated.

Liam van Loenen of the Silverstein gallery experienced a similar shift in attitude when reviewing Behbahani’s photography. When he first saw thumbnails of her work, he said, “I can’t say I was particularly impressed by it.” When the actual work arrived, however, “Only then did I feel interested in the work. From the group of 10 [hanging artists], she was someone whose work I wanted to learn more about.”

It is this reaction that Nosratian sees from many gallerists and collectors, and while Nosratian typically does not collaborate with other artists, he is working with Behbahani on her current video project because, quite simply, “my name gets to be next to her name.”

Bahar shooting at the Caspian Sea

The newest film is a collaborative effort between Behbahani and Almagul Menlibayeva, a noted video artist from Kazakhstan. Continuing her interest in observing an event from multiple perspectives, the film will focus on the history and political implications of the Caspian Sea, an oil-rich area that both Iran and Kazakstan border. They have been working on the project for the last eight months, and hope to finish by early summer. Menlibayeva arrived two months ago to work with Behbahani during the editing process.

As they worked on a recent Sunday afternoon, Nosratian at his desk sporting chunky headphones, Menlibayeva hunched over her screen and Behbahani reading printed-out research, no one spoke. Only the clicking of keyboards, the creak of a chair and the bubbling of water could be heard. Hot water is kept at a boil throughout the day, and two teapots sat ready on the stove. “When you hear water is boiling, it feels that there is a home and there is a life,” Behbahani explained. “I think for us it means that the wife of the house is around, the mother. Someone who is taking care of everything, to serve people in the house. It’s a very warm feeling. You go to the house of a person in Iran and they don’t have tea – it’s like, either they’re not very welcoming or sad or something is wrong in their life,” she said with a light laugh.

Behbahani is highly conscious of her Eastern background, and just as aware of her Western audience. She has come to realize differences in the ways Iranian and American critics confront her work.  “Over there they criticize your work as a contemporary work, as a piece of art, because you are all the same. We are in Iran,” she said. “But here they look at you as a Middle Eastern artist that does something that should be related to issues of the Middle East or some characteristic, which I agree, should have the characteristic of my own roots and culture, but the definition is different.” She found that many members of the media were focusing their questions on irrelevant cultural details, such as whether she covered her hair, instead of reacting to her art. “Sometimes I doubted that they even saw the work because they didn’t make any statement about the work, and it was disappointing.”

For a while, Behbahani intentionally avoided any cultural or religious elements in her work, nervous to include elements that would either label her as Middle Eastern or be misconstrued by a Western audience. For her, the chador is a symbol of her grandmother, of family and nostalgia. For many American viewers, however, it is an instant commentary on religious or political issues, so she excised them from her art. Behbahani’s paintings from 2000 are abstract and devoid of any overtly nationalistic attributes, using a translucent layering effect to convey multiple perspectives. Her marks are delicate but their movement and energy is vigorous, at times even alarming.

"The Chair" (2009), courtesy of the LTMH Gallery

Last year, she began experimenting with silk screens. Wrapping the screen around wooden frames, she was able to achieve the same spectral, multilayered effect as her films. Yet Behbahani began to include more culturally-specific elements, with collaged images of Iranian women and furniture peering through the transparent silk. They caught the attention of Anahita Varzi, director of the LTMH Gallery. Varzi reviewed Behbahani’s work, looking for pieces to include in the “Tehran-New York” show that opened at the LTMH Gallery this past March. “We wanted to bring in something that was new, that was fresh, that was cutting edge, something that spoke for itself,” Varzi said of the show.

She saw that in the silk screen paintings, and chose to include three pieces in the show. “We thought it was very unique, unique in terms of the form and the use of materials, and the way that she played with the materials and the storyline. The theme of homeland, memory, personal issues and cultural issues is nothing new for Iranian artists, but the way she translated it in the work was really, really wonderful.” There is an ambiguity to her aesthetic that draws the viewer close and challenges them to carefully study the work, to understand what is actually going on. The poetic beauty of Behbahani’s surfaces, which Varzi noted as rooted in Iranian aesthetics, merges with more contradictory aspects of Iranian culture, such as images of the veil.

In her more recent paintings, Behbahani has continued to incorporate more overtly Iranian elements and presents them in a satiric tone. In her “My Fantezi (Broken Fantasy)” series (2009 – 2010), she includes the faint, fluid white outline of a cat lying on a sofa, a teapot balancing precariously atop her head, platters of fruit and Persian rugs. She still embraces an abstract aesthetic and a delicate, ephemeral tone to her markings, but by cramming all things “Persian” into the composition, Behbahani boldly challenges the definition and its subsequent assumptions.

“As I get older, I think I should talk about what comes from my heart,” she said. Though she relies on her art for income, and can’t afford to push her work too far beyond what her viewers are ready to accept, Behbahani sees her work as a vehicle to enact change. “I should practice to make it personal so it detaches from stereotypes…I think art can do that.”

A BFF by Travis Cain

By Zachary Sniderman

Two of Travis Cain’s kids are running around his apartment. His youngest, Liam, stops for a moment to show his mom and dad a double spin-jump he’s been working on. His oversized green shirt has the familiar “I ♥ New York” logo on it, but the heart has been replaced by a four-leaf clover. The shirt whips around his small body as Liam lands precariously close to a side table. He stumbles for a moment, and then continues running. Aidan, the middle child, alternates between playing with a sharp wooden pyramid and using a plush donut pillow, sold by designer toy store Kid Robot, as a hat. The eldest son, David, is understandably staying in his room to avoid the ruckus.

Dad stands in the middle of the chaotic living room with a slight smile. Cain, 39, is a mix of business and urban spirit wearing a bright red graphic t-shirt and grey slacks paired with dress shoes. Cain’s dark brown hair nails the controlled, messy, wind-swept look, framing a face of one-day’s stubble. Cain was a competitive discus-thrower in high school. He stands at roughly six feet tall, with a strong build and calm demeanor.

Liam gets up on the arm of the couch and swan dives into the pillows, Cain’s wife, Carol, tries to corral Liam while taking Aidan to potty. It’s 8:37 p.m. and the boys are trying not to go to bed.

“I want to show you my Super Mario drawing,” Aidan says, returning from the potty. Before Carol can speak, Aidan scampers into his room. Carol echoes him, “I think he wants to show you his drawings.” Aidan returns with a stack of papers, some scribbles, some recognizable. His “Super Mario” is a loose blob, crowned by a patch of red pencil crayon stamped with an “M.” Also in the pile is a picture of his mom, Carol, that looks a lot like a squid, and a “monster”: A jumble of bright orange scratches covered by black splotches.

Carol takes the pictures and puts them down as Liam and Aidan realize that the trip to their room (which they share) has backfired. Now cornered in their room, Carol shoos them to bed. Liam lets out a low howl.

“Is that a Where The Wilds Things Are howl?” I ask Cain.

“No, he’s just howling like a wolf,” Cain says.

Cain’s mind is bursting with the same childish exuberance and rough energy of Liam and Aidan. Cain is a graphic artist recently initiated into the world of designer toys, most importantly, by working with Kid Robot. Kid Robot is a New York-based industry-giant of designer toy culture. It both sells and commissions figurines (and some street-wear) that can range anywhere from $5 to $5,000 depending on the designer. Most of Kid Robot’s toys are meant for collectors or older audiences, even though the SoHo store gets it’s fair share of kid customers. Working with Kid Robot is an elusive honor most designers only aspire to.

Cain got his start with Kid Robot using a palette of bright neon colors, pop references, and new, strange ideas. The toys he creates, like most designer toys, are sold in limited batches and straddle the divide between adorable (one figure looks like a rabbit made out of cheese) and disturbing (his cheese rabbit comes with miniature cheese grater). That blend of cute and dangerous has slowly become one of Cain’s trademarks. His most successful toys were a line called “BFFs” that he created for Kid Robot.

The bold designs and punchy colors of designer toys have more in common with graffiti and urban artists than they do with mass-market retailers like Toys R Us. Designer toys are a young phenomenon and a new entrée into the American art world. Most boxes sold at Kid Robot display the disclaimer: “This is a work of art, not a toy.”

The BFFs, by Travis Cain

The BFFs (short for “Best Friends Forever”) were sold in a popular “blind box” format. Blind boxes are just a couple inches tall and wide; any toys to be sold this way are necessarily small in order to fit into the hand-sized boxes. Each blind box features a line of toys. The box advertises the series and the designer but not the actual toy inside (thus “blind”). It is entirely possible to buy six boxes at random and end up with six of the same toys. Blind boxes are considered a standard entry point for beginning designer who then graduate to larger scale, detailed projects.

Each of Cain’s BFF blind boxes contains a pair of ordinary, every-day objects hurting each other (the tagline reads: “Love Hurts”). The two parts, or best friends, have sweet little smiles. One in each pair has x’s for eyes to show that it’s dead. Cain’s ironic take on ultimate friendship includes a balloon and two pins, a steak with a knife through it, a heart and arrow, a cavity-tooth and lollipop, a tree-stump with an axe, a hot dog with a barbeque skewer, and a final mystery pairing only shown in silhouette (it’s a bomb with a match, also with smiles). Mystery toys are common because of the collector-minded nature of blind boxes.

About 20,000 boxes of BFFs were shipped to Kid Robot in 2009. The entire run sold out in three months. Although it’s difficult to say why certain toys – especially by new artists – sell better than others, Cain’s chalks it up to their universal appeal: “I think a five-year old girl can walk into Kid Robot and like my toys but also a person who might be an avid vinyl collector can walk into Kid Robot and probably find something that they like in the BFFs as well.”

At an early age, Cain was fascinated by the designs in Star Wars: How C3PO was put together, detailed set pieces like the storm trooper costumes and guns. Cain was impressed not only with the finished design, but the time, thought, and painstaking detail that went into them. He went from sketching space ships and star battles to watching the birth of MTV. The bright neon aesthetic of 80’s MTV and music videos like Duran Duran’s “Rio” would influence Cain’s future color palette and preferences.

Cain’s interest in pop culture was piqued by the modern style and fashion magazines that his brother brought home to read. “Because he was my older brother it rubbed off on me… and I started seeing the ads in his GQ magazines, and drawing and redrawing them in pencil, drawing the photographs, and I think that was part of me getting impressed with type too.” Cain drafted logos for his own fashion company, dabbled in break dance, and started screen-printing. “I think my interest in design kind of evolved from interest in space and toys and things like that more towards music and fashion design and that kind of world,” Cain said.

In 2002 he moved to New York to earn a design MFA from the School of Visual Arts. While there, he developed a reputation for vast, lateral creativity: an ability to try, design, and approach a swathe of fields. This set of skills eventually landed him at Madison-based design firm Planet Propaganda, where he finally broke into toy design during the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial. The triennial invites designers to participate around a central theme. In 2006, both Planet Propaganda and Kid Robot were invited as honorees.

As a kind gesture of inspired creativity, Kid Robot invited all the participating firms to submit designs for their popular line of Dunnys. Kid Robot made its name (and much of it’s money) off a series of blank canvas blind box toys. These figures were made to look like one of two anthropomorphized animals: a rabbit (dunny) or a monkey (munny). When artists started stripping the paint off the dunny’s to make custom figures, Kid Robot released the entirely white monkey (munny) in response. Normally, established street artists are invited to decorate one dunny as part of an annual set to be sold in-store. Aside from copies of their creations, most beginning dunny artists receive little compensation.

In 2006, this artistic cameo was extended to Planet Propaganda and Cain jumped on the opportunity. Being a Wisconsin man, his first thought was cheese, giving birth to the aptly named “Cheeze” Dunny. A second design was approved, called “Ribeye.” It was designed as a companion to Cheeze and looked like it was made of meat. The self-destructive twist? Ribeye came with a tiny meat cleaver.

Cheeze and Ribeye, by Travis Cain

Designing toys was something Cain never expected to do, but happily embraced. He had always been interested in toy design and urban art but he assumed it was a form reserved for street artists or those within Kid Robot’s tight clique. The divide between underground and mainstream artist has been a continual obstacle to Cain’s progress in the toy world. It doesn’t help that after Planet Propaganda, Cain became the senior artistic director at Kiehls Since 1851, commonly referred to just as “Kiehls,” in April of 2008. Working for a major corporation is anathema to the image presented by Kid Robot and it’s cadre of street artists. It is tantamount to selling out.

Working for Kiehls, Cain feels his brand has already been labeled as mainstream: “I took a sort of back door route to get into it whereas I think most people that design toys have been invited to do it because they’ve built up this street cred and are kind of well-known as an [urban] artist in another realm.”

Ideally, Cain wants to be an established urban artist, running a shop full of skateboards he designed, toys he created, or manning a comprehensive design studio dedicated to eccentric and far-reaching 3D projects. In reality, Cain needs his job to provide for his family, which includes three growing boys and their educations. Cain has limited his personal expenses to the bare necessities; his family takes priority.

Instead of a design studio, Cain does much of his non-Kiehls work on a small wooden desk pressed up against a wall in the bedroom he shares with Carol. Without much space to draw or sketch, most of Cain’s productivity is filtered through a powerful Apple desktop computer that dominates his desk. A few of his previous toys dot the shelves above the computer, including a larger version of his meat dunny, this time with a life-size metal fork sticking out of its faux-meat head. Absent is a set of dunnys made out of wood. The self-destructive twist? One has holes drilled through it, another is sawed in two. Those two come with mini power-tools including a drill and a hack saw, respectively.

A wooden dunny by Travis Cain

There are no other toys, or objects of real significance around Cain’s workspace. Although he’d love to buy a couple new blind boxes from designer Amanda Visell, he can’t bring himself to fork over the cash. He’s found one way around this by setting up a trade with another Kid Robot designer. He gets toys in exchange for giving out Kiehls products. As a result, his desk at Kiehls is spotted with an assortment of Kid Robot toys and figurines.

Despite this good-natured exchange, Cain has had a hard time establishing relationships with other Kid Robot artists. He’s currently trying to move from blind boxes to a new, larger-scale, stand-alone figure. He reached out through Facebook message to several toy designers with questions and ideas but received no responses. Cain’s not sure if he is being ignored because of his background or if Facebook just isn’t the right way to go about it. Either way, he’s been largely left alone and cast aside by the community. Even Kid Robot, with whom the BFFs were an incredible financial success, have been hesitant about green-lighting Cain’s more ambitious projects. Instead, he will be re-releasing his BFFs line with a redesigned box and several additional figures (he couldn’t say what they would be due to contract agreements) in September 2010. Even that has been slowed down over disagreements on Cain’s new box art: Kid Robot wants it to look more like the original box design and Cain has begrudgingly agreed, after all, they are footing the bill.

The most recent knock against Cain comes from a leak of the new 2010 collection of dunnys. Cain contributed one design along with major names like Frank Kozik, Sket One, MAD, and even Amanda Vissell. Cain’s idea separates the figure into two pieces: the head floats above the body like a balloon on a string. The whole figure is shiny and bright orange and blue with a sweet little smile (like his BFFs). Unfortunately, it closely resembles a small batch of customs done by a Kid Robot forum board-member. That original design featured a dunny head as a shiny balloon being held by a black and red dunny body.

A post by Mark Mohr on designer toy blog Hello Vinyl reads: “Travis Cain Copies Customs for Dunny 2010?… Travis has taken a lot of heat over his Wooden Dunny already, and people accuse him of having no originality and this certainly strengthens the case.” A post on Kid Robot’s own blog attacks Cain and Kid Robot for being too mainstream: “The thing that really upsets me is that these balloon dunnys were first done on an underground custom level and Travis Cain made one for mass production… If [Kid Robot] wanted to put a balloon dunny into production then they should have found the boardie who created one of the firsts and asked him to do it.” Mohr, a proud owner of Cain’s wooden dunny, sees it as a more lasting problem: “His rep has been tarnished, even if it is basically [Kid Robot’s] fault.”

Cain said he didn’t know about the previous dunnys, which were posted deep in the bowels of Kid Robot’s extensive forum archive, and shrugs off the personal attacks as opinions from the obsessed. “That’s the way it is on those forums, they’re pretty much calling me an asshole… and that Kid Robot was evil because they were paying artists to rip off ideas that boardies had done before,” Cain said sitting at his desk. “And this is before the series is even out yet, it’s based on a leaked image.” Although Cain rarely gives away his emotions, his voice spikes with a touch of anger and a trace of disappointment.

Still, Cain proudly shows off his concept designs for the dunny. In the computer folder are about 10 different drafts of the same design. Some folders focus on tweaking a color, or changing a material there, but all of them show a fixation on perfecting the minute details. It’s the same care, thought, and passion for minutiae that initially hooked Cain into the design world of Star Wars. His computer is figuratively piled high with concepts, drafts, edits, re-edits, and re-re-edits of any number of projects. His new BFFs have wrapped save for the final box details, his latest dunny has been largely panned by the faithful, yet Cain hasn’t stopped working. His desktop background is tiled with a set of color variations on a large-scale, stand-alone project. Cain pitched a rough draft of the toy but it wasn’t accepted. After its initial rejection by Kid Robot, Cain tweaked the size and shape, playing with different color combinations in order to pitch it again. While he couldn’t divulge too many details, the new toy shares a similarly innocuous smile and friendly demeanor. The self-destructive twist? A giant two-by-four studded with little plastic nails.

Earlier in the night, before Liam and Aidan started their bedtime rumpus, Cain spoke about maybe opening a studio as a way to dedicate himself to his designs. He sat at his small desk in his dark bedroom. The occasional rumble, honks, and horns of Washington Heights traffic were muffled by the dark drapes by Cain’s bed. “I think if I had my own studio space I’d probably would be a little more prolific,” Cain said. In the living room, the boys were playing loudly with their mom. “Like, I could do more of this stuff to propose to people… but you know I work some late hours anyway, I just don’t know if it would be that much different.” Cain is a very quiet man with a very busy brain and an hour-long commute to work in order to provide for his family. The studio is a distant dream, and one unfortunately out of Cain’s reach. “Unless it was like, in the basement of this building, and at night I was able to go there after my kids went to bed and just work there for a while,” Cain said, his boys playing or howling in the background.

For more background and images of Cain, check out his site HERE.

Travis Cain's BFFs

Mended Spiderweb #19 (Laundry Line)

By Megan Youngblood

Nina Katchadourian had one of her first self-proclaimed uninvited collaborations with nature at age 30, 12 years ago, when she was living in Finland’s archipelago, amid the forest of Pörtö, an area where she and her brother, Kai, spent childhood summers visiting their grandparents. Katchadourian stepped up to a spider’s web she thought was in need of desperate repair. “How can I mend this? What could I use?” she thought. Nina inserted segments of red sewing thread, an idea triggered by a 1950s illustrated Swedish nature book she found in the house on the island. The book, Kom Bara Lite Närmare (Just Come a Little Closer), described the spider’s habit of using its thread as wrapping paper to package its dead catch and present it to another spider. The morning after her first mending, she found her red threads thrown in a pile on the ground. The spider always rejected her attempts to repair the web even if the webs looked abandoned. “I was thinking a lot about it as a sibling rivalry,” she said, “where I was in it together with the spider but we would kind of one up one another and there was a competitive but loving relationship at play.”

It wasn’t until the spider spurned the thread that Katchadourian considered the uninvited collaboration of Mended Spiderwebs an art project, which inspired her parallel project GIFT/GIFT, a video documenting a spider throwing out her word GIFT spelled out in red thread. With almost childlike curiosity, Katchadourian’s art investigates nature in uneasy and humorous situations. Her intention is to defamiliarize the viewer with common subject matter. With a bit of sarcasm and playfulness, she deliberately sets in motion a set of doomed expectations in these types of collaborations. After all, a spider’s nature is to keep its web free from foreign objects unless, of course, they are prey.

“I’m really not after a shining, successful happy ending with these things I like to make. Failure and misunderstanding and where things go terribly wrong I think are often places that I look towards for starting points for ideas,” Katchadourian guffaws, amused by her own process.

Katchadourian, born in Stanford, Calif., grew up in a family she refers to as “a scrambled version of world maps.” Her father, Herant, a human biology professor at Stanford University, is a Turkish-born Armenian, raised in Beirut. Her mother, Stina, a literary translator and writer, is part of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority. Her brother, Kia, who veered entirely from academia and directly into nature, is a professional windsurfer. As a conceptual artist, Katchadourian is most unique in the way she employs both a playfully sarcastic and seriously inquisitive approach to explore the minute workings of our world and to communicate to us her perspective as a viable art form. She has exhibited domestically and internationally and is most known for her conceptual themes of nature, mapping, translation and public space. The Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs featured a 10-year survey of her art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a solo exhibition of her video installations in 2008, and the Turku Art Museum in Turku, Finland, exhibited a solo show of her photographs and installations made specifically in Finland.

“One of the things Katchadourian does very well is to take aesthetic, scientific or administrative structures and push them so far that they stop making sense,” said Brian Dillon, U.K. editor of Cabinet Magazine, a Brooklyn-based art magazine. “Apart from her fantastic wit, of which her recent YouTube hit ‘Sky Mall Kitties’ is a painfully funny example, what sets her apart is the care with which she attends to the every day, and the way she sees extreme strangeness in ordinary situations, or exaggerates that strangeness in the work […] Of course, her work often involves complex conceptual strategies, and much research, but perhaps it’s actually this element of minutely detailed looking that sets her apart.”

In “Sky Mall Kitties,” which has received nearly 55,000 views, Katchadourian collages images from SkyMall catalogues (yes, the ones found in the back flap of airline passenger seats) with music to construct a nonsensical commercial-like theme song about the catalogue’s over-usage of cats to sell its products. She sings: “Sky Mall Kitties/ there’s kitties everywhere / Sky Mall Kitties / the kitties of the air […] Kitty is elegant / Kitty got class / Kitty doesn’t need the extra padding in the ass.” The video flashes images of a cat stepping gracefully from a bathroom storage chest and a model indicating where to place ShapeUp butt pads to “add sexy curves without surgery.”

Katchadourian, an owner of three cats, uses the video as a tongue-in-cheek expression, pointing out the cuteness of cats and the absurdity of SkyMall’s product placement, an idea that seems to come out of left field. However, this song makes sense in light of her favorite pastime, Record Club, a potluck listening party where a group of her friends gather to exchange music and sound.

“A couple of weeks ago, we had Record Club and the theme was that we picked a year, 1977,” Katchadourian said. “So I did all of this research of what happened in 1977. I was nine years old. I remember certain things clearly from that time. I got educational music that I would hear on TV, like “School House Rock” or theme songs and stuff from “Electric Company” and “Sesame Street,” which has also been a huge influence musically.”

On an unusually warm day in April, sitting on a Soho stoop near her part-time gig as a curator for The Drawing Center and eating a salad, Katchadourian talked about why she moved from California to Brooklyn 14 years ago to pursue an art career. Now, at 42, she spends much of her time traveling for artist lecture series and collaborative projects with college students at universities like Austin Peay and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Wearing Ralph Lauren sunglasses astride her shoulder-length wavy brown hair and a single black string adorned with a teeny gold key pendant tied around her neck, she said New York is a maddening city to live in when considering the environment.

“In California, where I grew up, we were already recycling in the ’70s. It was just something you did. And here, even just now when we bought lunch, it just drives me crazy that they want to give you a paper bag,” she said in exaggerated disbelief. “I’m not perfect by any means. We drive a car. We have an old house with crappy windows that need to be replaced, we waste a lot of heat, and our thermostat is set too high.”

Describing the distinct differences between where she grew up and where she lives now, this no-nonsense, natural Katchadourian is dressed in a plain black tee, matched with a short skirt, black knee-stockings, and brown, vintage-style stitched, lace-up pumps.

“Look at the man across the street,” she said as she freezes mid-bite with a piece of lettuce on her fork.

While Katchadourian watches with a smiling, gaping mouth, a slender man with long black braids trailing down his shoulders strolls by wearing only blue underwear and carrying a plastic sack of groceries.

“Oh my God. And braids. Everyone notices. It’s kind of great you can do that without getting arrested,” Katchadourian said. “That’s why I like living here. There’s curve balls coming at you when you least expect it. He knew that was weird, too. Did you see that look on his face?”

Many of her projects probe human interaction with the natural world, trying to figure out where we place ourselves in nature and what we want from it. She often uses animals that are generally regarded as repulsive and unsympathetic creatures, such as spiders, snakes, caterpillars and rats. Katchadourian devised a plan to counter her own squeamishness about the natural order of things – exemplified by a snake swallowing a rat. Animal Crossdressing (2002) allows the prey to escape its natural fate and upsets expected results in the struggle for life. Two photographs and a three-minute video depict her attempts at dressing a snake in a nylon body stocking and stuffing it into a large rat suit, and met with great resistance, inserting a rat into the head of a long, camouflage imitation snakeskin sleeve. We don’t expect to feel sympathy for the rat’s travails, but in this case, because it is forcibly converted from prey to predator, we do.­­­­­

When she was in a remote area of Trinidad on an artist’s residenc­­e­­­­ at Caribbean Contemporary Arts, she mistook an unfamiliar bird’s call for a car alarm. This misunderstanding led to Natural Car Alarms (2002), a public art project commissioned by Long Island City’s SculptureCenter. Katchadourian spliced together sounds from six different birds to replace each of three different cars’ typical six-tone alarm systems.

Finland’s Unnamed Islands (2000), recently on display at the Museum of Art and Design’s exhibition Slash: Paper Under the Knife, takes a cultural relevancy approach to nature. Katchadourian cut out hundreds of islands, too small to be named in an atlas of Finland, and placed the clusters of paper between microscope slides on long aluminum shelves spanning the wall. Similarly, Finland’s Longest Road (2000) relocates pieces of maps in ­­a scientific context. The entire length of highway E75, which runs from Helsinki in the south of Finland to Utsjoki in the north, is coiled up in a Petri dish. The intersection of geology and genealogy calls into question and repurposes the map to accentuate Katchadourian’s disoriented cultural identity.

“She and her brother never had the typical American childhood summer with summer camps,” Katchadourian’s mother, Stina, said. “They were left to their own resources on [Pörtö], and it is something that certainly shows in Nina’s art. She’s made a lot of her art there.”

Surrounded by the Baltic Sea, the island gave Katchadourian the opportunity to explore nature on foot with a keen eye, stimulating her pensive nature, and her grandparents allowed her a creative environment where she begin thinking about nature in scientific and artistic terms. Katchadourian’s grandfather, who died when she was seven years old, worked for the forestry service and taught them scientific names of plants, trees and birds when they visited. Her grandmother, Nunni, was an amateur artist whose favorite pastime was painting very detailed, tiny studies of feathers, plants and flowers.

“[Nunni] was somebody that would have become an artist if she could have afforded it, but it wasn’t really an option for her,” Katchadourian said. “Their methodology has had a big impact on me, especially when I’m in Finland. I don’t think that I would have made a project like the Mended Spiderweb series if I weren’t in the mindset a lot of the time where I was looking at nature and kind of paying attention to the way ants rove around on the ground or the way that spiders make their webs.”

Pörtö is a community of several islands, where the same people have been going back for three generations to be with family, Stina explained. Storms approach quickly, requiring inhabitants to be alert to shifts in nature, and short summers discourage long stays. Although it’s not a place people visit frequently, (when Katchadourian was a kid, the island house didn’t have plumbing or electricity), it offers both a sense of community and solitude. Beginning in 1997, Nina returned to Pörtö with Stina to find the places Nunni snapped the nightgown photographs, a series of images Nunni took of Stina wearing the same handmade nightgown every birthday, from infancy until she could only hold the gown up in front of herself.

“This went on for 18 years, and through the wars [Winter War, Continuation War and Lapland War],” Stina said. “Our family was evacuated, and we left our home. We had to be in various places because Finland was at war and being bombed. And she still kept this up and had this camera with her.”

The Nightgown Pictures (1996-2004), a series of 16 prints, documents Katchadourian and Stina’s search, pairing the original nightgown photos with the landscape replicas of places they identified in Pörtö.

“I wasn’t really unusually oriented toward the visual arts [as a kid],” Katchadourian said. “In fact, I never took an art class in high school. I was much more interested in things like theater and music. It was right around the time [Nunni] died that I was a sophomore in college and I had just started to get more serious about making art. It’s sad; it’s kind of like this conversation I never quite got to have with her.”

“What I really, really wish, I wish so many times, I could have talked to her about,” Katchadourian said straining neck and facial muscles realizing the lost opportunity, “those nightgown photographs, and why she made them. Was the impulse a family document? Was it a record keeping kind of thing? Was it artistic at all for her? I just don’t know.”

“I think, in her case, she didn’t conceptualize it as a piece of art,” Stina said. “Because of the circumstances, because of the war, it was a way for her to document the continuity with normal family life.”

Although Katchadourian’s parents have lived in the United States for more than 45 years, they both have maintained distinctive but hard-to-place accents, very unlike their son and daughter’s California ones. Inspired by posters in New York advertising courses in accent elimination, Katchadourian arranged the project, Accent Elimination (2005), to work with her parents in an attempt to erase their foreign cadences and for her to adopt their accents.

“Accent Elimination is one of the most complicated things I’ve ever made,” Katchadourian said. “It was mind-bogglingly difficult to get our heads around this strange task to try to learn to speak like one another.”

The six-screen video records their struggle to hear and to imitate each other, exposing the accent as a gift that can be handed down as heritage rather than something to be diluted or erased. It also points to the convoluted and contradictory processes by which people try to preserve the distinctive marks of their culture while at the same time employing strategies of assimilation.

Katchadourian is currently engrossed in a public audio project commissioned by her alma mater, Brown University, called Advice from a Former Student, which will open in October. Through interviews with Brown alumni, she will collect advice to blast from a highly directional loud-speaker placed on the Faunce Arch, the entrance to campus.

A firm believer in following impulses and working cross-disciplinarily, Nina’s prolificacy doesn’t stop at photography, sculpture, video and sound. In 2006, she joined The Wingdale Community Singers, a social-style folk band founded by novelist Rick Moody. Since college, she’s played in a band, but once she moved to New York, she drifted out of her performance comfort zone and made art her focus.

“It’s really a pain-in-the-neck-scary here to go to an open mic somewhere,” Nina said about her stage fright in New York. “I didn’t have it in me. I just didn’t want to do it […] Art making is really solitary in some ways. With music, for better or worse, bound to egos and temperaments, personalities and preferences of others, it’s a collaboration. It’s been a really, really important part of my life in the last few years. I love performing now. Performing is still this place where there’s this feeling I have a lot of room to grow and a lot to learn. It’s a rush being in front of people.  Playing alone is still the single, scariest, most challenging, difficult thing that I ever attempt to do, and I don’t attempt to do it often. Playing with a band has become a much more comfortable thing.”

Together with Moody, Hannah Marcus and David Grubbs, she writes music, sings, and plays acoustic guitar, accordion and recorder. (She can also play the Balinese gamelan). Rooted in traditional harmonies, The Wingdales play old-timey Americana tunes. On Spirit Duplicator, The Wingdale’s 2009 release, Nina contributes “Profilia,” “Aviary” and the closing cover of the Carter Family’s “Death is Only a Dream,” a performance that sounds remarkably close to Rosanne Cash.

“Songwriting is one of the most intriguing and fascinating things I’ve ever engaged, and it’s very different from making art,” Nina said. “A song somehow when it’s done, sometimes feels like I had nothing to do with it. It sort of just wrote itself. It’s very mysterious. I never feel that way about art. Art is always very conscious every step of the way for me, making decisions that I’m very actively aware of.”

For Nina, who has exhibited at PS1/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, New Langton Arts, Artists Space and the Palais de Tokyo, among others, music and art carry a comical and weighty experience. From her forced attempts to collaborate with nature to her offbeat subject matter in projects, such as Mended Spiderwebs, Natural Car Alarms and Accent Elimination, she deliberately misunderstands the world around her as a way to communicate how she views the complex relationship between humans and nature.

“The way it works for me is that I don’t always know why I am doing it,” she said. “I’m really a believer in this –that sometimes you have to jump in and follow an impulse without knowing exactly what it means or knowing what it’s about. Sometimes impulsive things like that lead to art projects. Sometimes they don’t.”

Children’s book author, artist, and teacher, Timothy Bellavia’s face illuminates with the self-tanning products he slathers on that gives his pale, Italian skin an orangey glow. He’s been obsessed with darkening his skin color for two decades. Not that he’ll ever be confused for Michael Jackson, but all of his visits to tanning salons did lead to melanoma skin cancer in 1998. He is tiny, quirky and whimsical, almost doll-like; dressed in black pants, a pinstripe blazer, big, dark sunglasses, and perfectly highlighted blond hair. It’s obvious why he’s able to connect with children, but underneath that child-like spirit is a past of darkness.

Bellavia, 39, could’ve become another statistic of bullycide, bullying that leads to suicide. Starting at age 9, he started exploring suicide. He drove a steak knife into his wrist. The scar still remains.  There were several other attempts that continued up until he graduated from college. Bellavia now makes light of the situation, “I was even a failure at suicide, he says.”

“I asked my mom when I was 25, ‘Why didn’t you get me help?’ She said, ‘Oh, Timmy, you couldn’t handle the men in the white jackets.’ I said, ‘No, mom, you couldn’t handle it.’ It’s always about what other people think.”

Bellavia tries not to dwell on the past. He touches upon it, but only to acknowledge where it’s brought him today. He’s received the L.E.A.P. (Learning Through an Expanded Arts Program) Recognition Award in 2003, was recently nominated for the Lambda Literary Awards (also known as the “Lammys”), which recognizes published works that celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender themes, and has penned a total of six children’s books. This year is a milestone for Bellavia. He is about to release the 10^th anniversary edition of his first book, We Are All The Same Inside. It’s the book that landed him an invitation to speak at the United Nations’ Day of Tolerance in 2003. The anniversary edition has a new cover and the original 32-page story, featuring the blue alien, Sage, who comes to Earth to teach children about being open-minded to all cultures and ethnicities. An anniversary celebration will be held at the Brooklyn Historical Society on May 23.

“I am thrilled to work with him again,” Kate Fermoile, vice president for exhibits and education at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Fermoile, went to went to the same undergrad as Bellavia, nearly 20 years ago. “I love Sage and the We Are All the Same Inside book and can’t wait to see the workshop in action.”

With the recent headlines in the news about Phoebe Prince, the 15-year-old girl who committed suicide after suffering months of bullying from her classmates, Bellavia’s book has more significance now than ever.

In April, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the annual suicide rate among Americans 15 to 19 years old is about seven per 100,000 and teenage boys are more likely to commit suicide than are girls. Also, CNN reported a study from the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network in August 2009 that said despite recent strides towards preventing bullying in schools and increased awareness programs, 65 percent of teens are bullied each year and most believe adults can’t help them. Bellavia, who is openly gay, says he hopes his book that “celebrates our common humanity,” can teach children to embrace our similarities while accepting and honoring one and other’s differences.

“He is a complete walking contradiction that somehow manages to work and function smoothly,” Anna Indelicato says. Indelicato has known and worked with Bellavia for two years. “Tim is a judgment person. When he meets someone, he wants to figure them out and the strange things that they may have done. On the other side of it, Tim is a walking message of tolerance, and no matter how strange or crazy something is, Tim just gets people are like that sometimes.”

Bellavia grew up in Lyndonville, N.Y., which according to the 2000 census has a population of 862. He is the third of four brothers. His older brother, Randy, 41, is the closest in age to Bellavia. Randy describes their household as one filled to capacity with loud, opinionated, extroverted Italian-strength testosterone. Randy is aware that his brother had everything but those qualities.

“As a teenager he convinced everyone around him that he was introverted and shy,” Randy says. “This was, of course, not the case. He merely had little to add to our inane conversations about sports, politics, and religion.”

Bellavia was different; not just from his brothers, but the others in Lydonville.

“I’m someone who can’t conform to a small farm town with missing teeth,” Bellavia says. “I’m very quirky and someone who does not fit the mold of a farm kid. Even if I had a farm outfit on with a flannel shirt and Wranglers (God forbid!) I would still look like Annie Oakley!”

Not that he ever tried to fit in. He wore leg warmers and his sweaters off the shoulder as a homage to Flashdance and the tightest jeans he could find. He can still remember wearing a tight red football jersey with a jacket over it, Jordache jeans and his hair teased up as high as it would go. Bellavia says it was his attempt to copy the cover art of Olivia Newton-John’s album Tied Up. Looking back, he’s not ashamed. He sees pictures of himself and thinks, “God, there was not one flaw on that little kid. He had a lot of spunk and he could’ve been Corey Haim or Kirk Cameron.”

Bellavia doesn’t deny that his Tiger Beat magazine look was an escape. He describes himself as the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz. He was a sissy, but brave enough to be ferocious in spite of that. Maybe he’s still seeking the Wizard to give him courage because to this day he is not over the ridicule he endured. Upon walking into restaurants, panic attacks still occasionally arise. You won’t see him crying, though. He hasn’t since 1990. Even those teardrops weren’t for him, but for his eldest brother, Danny, who was marrying a woman he didn’t believe was right for him. He feels the tears inside, but they won’t fall from his eyes. He deals with his emotions by freezing them and shutting people out of his life. It’s a technique he says he learned from his mother. It’s also where the title of his autobiography picture book Pieces of Ice comes from. The book documents his mentally and emotionally abusive childhood with his parents and his peers in school. One experience he talks about his “special time” with his father, a dentist. Over and over Mr. Bellavia would try to hypnotize his son by saying “Daddy loves you. Mommy loves you. Jesus loves you. You can love and marry a woman.” Bellavia says these experiences with his father escalated into self-hated and the thought that he wasn’t normal.  His parents even took him to a doctor, were he were informed the Bellavia’s that, “Normal teenage boys don’t like Olivia-Newton John.” Bellavia remembers his mother looked at his father and said, “Bill, all the kids love her.” He replied, “Yes, but they don’t want to be her!”

Today his father has grown. In April his father finally apologized for the pain he put him through as child and admitted how proud he was of his accomplishments. However, his mother is still struggling to accept the truth. Upon the release of Pieces of Ice, Mrs. Bellavia said to her son, ‘People are going to think that you want to sleep with men.’”

Randy says he read the book in several forms as it was being written. At first his reaction to it was a piece of art, calling it the best thing his brother had ever written. As far as accuracy goes, Randy says there is nothing involving him in the book that he recalls as occurring differently than as it was documented. “However, I should add that it seems clear to me that this is a book of the author’s memories, not necessarily a factual account of the capital T truth of the events recounted,” Randy says.

Throughout Bellavia’s youth, he always knew he had to escape. Rosa Parks is someone he admires because he sees similarities in her struggles with race to his with gender. Unlike Parks, who never left Alabama, Bellavia fled his hometown in hurry. In 1992 he arrived in New York, settled in Brooklyn for two years before moving into Manhattan and earned his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute. At the time he had a specific mission in mind—fame. Bellavia began creating a line of products that bared his name. In 1997 The Village Voice profiled him, and he spoke of himself as a character saying, “Timmy came to be when I was in graduate school at Pratt. Then suddenly there were Timmy T-shirts, Timmy paper dolls, Timmy greeting cards.”

Toni Schlesinger wrote that piece and said “In fact, it seems Bellavia can’t bring anything in the house without applying Timmy to it.”

During this period Bellavia was also working as a back-up dancer in drag for singing superstar Cyndi Lauper. In his spare time he was calling up the press, trying to get coverage on his projects and going to convention centers and walking into stores pitching his Timmy products. Today he says that Timmy is gone.

Now he spends his days with suitcase in tow, consisting of yarn, fabric, scissors, glue and doll patterns, traveling to New York City public schools, cultural institutions and transitional housing. In 2004 the New York City Department of Education recognized Bellavia’s achievements and awarded his company, The T.I.M.M.-E (Tolerance in Multi Media Education) a contract to amplify his mission.

“Most people want to make a difference and do something useful for society, but find it hard to achieve. He makes kids think, ‘Being different is okay’,” Kristin Walsh, who assisted Bellavia with Pieces of Ice, says. Walsh first met in Bellavia while they were in college and after years of not having any communication, they reunited via Facebook. Interestingly, Walsh and Bellavia once had a romantic relationship, and when she left him for the man who would become her husband, he was devastated. There are even moments today when he still refers to Walsh as his girlfriend and spends time at her house with her and her family.

In the near future, Bellavia wants to take his workshops in another direction: corporate America. He pictures business men and women rolling their eyes as they stuff dolls, but says it’s better than a PowerPoint presentation on teaching diversity in the workplace. He’s also working on a CD that coincides with the 10^th anniversary of We Are All The Same Inside. One of the collaborators on the project is Sherlie Matthews. Matthews, a singer and songwriter is best known as a background vocalist for Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Neil Diamond, Linda Ronstadt, and many more. Matthews laughs at how she became friends with Bellavia.

“We ‘met’ on MySpace. I spotted Timothy’s profile pic, and I requested his friendship, mainly because he was so attractive,” says Matthews. “That’s rather shallow, but it’s the truth. And my gaydar went off.”

Matthews, like many, has gotten to know a side of Bellavia. She describes him as happy and upbeat with an ever-present ting of hope, but she also spotted his vulnerability.

“He’s always anxious to please, sometimes to his detriment. Despite the fact he is super-intelligent, some people tend to take advantage of his kindness and his tendency to trust with a child-like openness.”

With the second decade of We Are All the Same Inside here, Bellavia is still reaching for success. It’s something he says he doesn’t have.  He’ll know he has found it when he finds respect from others about his work, which he still doesn’t feel like he completely has. “Maybe I don’t even have it for myself.”

Theresa Hoffmann and Anthony Rizzo play at LIC Bar in Long Island Ci

By Aaron Lee

In a rented rehearsal space in midtown Manhattan, Theresa Hoffmann and her husband, Anthony Rizzo (collectively known as Little Embers) are teaching her songs to the group’s new rhythm section. But Hoffmann, who looks ever more exhausted as the night drags on, can’t seem to get her guitar in tune.

As she works to get the last string just right, Rizzo moves in and grabs the machine head from her.  “Hit the string,” he says, as in, You just pluck the string and leave the tuning to me.

“No, just wait a minute,” she says, before he cuts her off, telling her again to just hit the string.  As she turns to give him easier access, the neck of her guitar bumps the microphone stand and she huffs in exasperation.

“Don’t be an asshole about it,” she chides in a voice that is too gentle to convey any real animosity, or even the frustration otherwise evident in her demeanor.  Rizzo, who presides soberly over the instruction of the new musicians, tunes the string and lets the jab pass.  After all, his wife works a full-time office job at the New York City Center Theater while working toward her Master’s in teaching English as a second language.  If she’s not in the mood to be handled, it’s understandable.

Whatever stress afflicts the musicians tonight, the music shows no signs of any tension.  Hoffmann’s smooth, coolly mature voice drips over the clever and catchy arrangements that her husband creates to match her songs.  Rizzo stops the group three or four times to point out a stop or lobby for a quicker tempo.  Then Hoffmann plays once through the song before insisting that the slower tempo was the better one.  Still, for a first run with two new members, this session goes about as smoothly as anyone could expect.

Little Embers represents the top tier of a thriving and, at times, immensely satisfying scene in Queens, a scene that is perhaps best described as urban alternative Country.  As a project, Little Embers lingers in its infancy.  The band debuted its first EP, Divided, on April 21 during a show at LIC Bar in Long Island City, a performance that showcased the group as self-assured and adept at commanding a crowd.

When a married couple forms a band, especially one with the kind of accessible sound that typifies the songs of Little Embers, the romantic relationship can be a hindrance on success.  The White Stripes, for example, insisted for years that they were brother and sister rather than husband and wife.  When asked about it, Jack White suggested that people often dismiss a married couple.  “When they’re brother and sister,” White told Rolling Stone, you go, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’  You care more about the music, not the relationship – whether they’re trying to save their relationship by being in a band.”

For Little Embers, though, being in a band feels more like the natural outgrowth of a relationship in which both partners have a unique musical sensibility and a compatible creative drive.  There is remarkably little overt friction between Hoffmann and Rizzo, and the music betrays something that our culture secretly despises and sneers at – the existence of an apparently happy couple.  How are we supposed to objectify the musicians, to draft them into fantasy, if they’re so disgustingly content?

“Well, we’re not selling sex,” says Rizzo.  “I mean, I think Theresa’s pretty easy on the eyes, and maybe that helps, but that’s not really the point of what we’re doing with the music.”  True enough.  Little Embers’ music is more likely to inspire fantasies of time and place than fantasies of any particular person.

The musical chemistry between Hoffmann and her husband is impeccable.  Rizzo’s simple picking accentuates all the emotional highs and lows of each equally simple progression, and occasionally he breaks out a solo as brief as it is thoughtful and impressive.  All the songs are Hoffmann’s, but to watch Rizzo play along, you’d think they were his own creations.  And in a way, they are.

“He bought me my first real guitar 13 or 14 years ago,” Hoffmann says, “and he gave me my first mix tape of The Replacements – forever changed my writing.”  Before that, she wrote music for piano and took inspiration from singer-songwriters like Shawn Colvin and Sarah McLachlan.   Both songstresses still resonate in her vocal style, a mix of wry edginess and sweet emotion.

Musically, however, Hoffmann is offering much more than standard Lilith fare.  The influence of Paul Westerberg’s Replacements, one of the great inexplicable under-achievers of 1990’s rock music, is woven through Little Embers’ rich, often moving textures.  Yet the connection to Westerberg, who Hoffmann and Rizzo each claim as a key influence, only reveals itself in the occasional flash of a melancholy guitar.

Hoffmann’s songwriting is more directly indebted to another of her long-time influences, Lucinda Williams, and beyond that, to the kind of classic outlaw country practiced by Hank Williams, Jr. and David Allan Coe – albeit, in the latter case, without the racist undertones.  At times, Hoffmann’s deeply accessible catalog feels like the soundtrack of slow summer days spent rocking on a front porch.   This Long Island girl’s twangy, deliberate tunes would be comfortably familiar to any Southerner who, lost among the bars in Queens, was lucky enough to stumble into a Little Embers show.

Little Embers are among the most pronounced practitioners of this sound that one could find in New York City.  Echoes of the golden days of country music are not unusual in the scene that Little Embers inhabits – a rich Americana landscape that populates bars in Long Island City and Astoria, where Hoffmann and Rizzo make their home.

Gustavo Rodriguez, a Queens musician and tireless advocate for local artists, is the booker and promoter for Long Island City venue LIC Bar, where Little Embers plays frequent sets.  In the last few years, he has become a leading figure in the scene.  “If there is a ‘Queens Sound’ at all,” he says, “it’s just a warmer, more accessible vibe.”  More accessible, indeed.

While some so-called indie groups strive to be outside the mainstream – sometimes to the point of being unlistenable – the artists that orbit in Rodriguez’s world would hold the attention of just about any crowd imaginable.  “Many of us in our circles are into Americana, really just a stew of country, R&B, roots music, and rockabilly,” Rodriguez says.  “Prominent Queens artists like Jeneen Terrana, Andy Stack, and Lee Ann Westover all play music in that vein.”

Hoffmann credits the country flavor in her songwriting partially to her mother, who was from Texas, and also to the early influence of Patsy Cline.   “I used to cover Patsy Cline when I first started playing guitar,” she says.  “I would play ‘Crazy’ and ‘Walking After Midnight’ and some others.”  If not for Hoffmann’s country predilection, Rizzo may never have discovered and developed his own hillbilly chops.

Anthony Rizzo met Hoffmann 15 years ago when they were both music majors at Nassau Community College.   She was a vocal major who had played piano in church – he was a guitar major and a punk rocker.  “I was playing at ABC No Rio on Rivington Street, back when it was this scene for elitist punk music, and no one dared to go down there,” he says.  “I was kind of a musical snob.”  The two formed an almost immediate connection, but for Rizzo, making it work meant broadening his musical horizons beyond the hardcore punk world.

“I had to be careful with Theresa,” he says.  “Our connection wasn’t a musical connection, so I didn’t want to dismiss her music or anything.  She smoked Camel Ultra Lights, so I knew I was going to have to tread carefully and sort of learn to accept her taste.”  Luckily for Rizzo, his future wife was a good enough songwriter to impress even a self-described elitist punk.  “When I first heard her music, I breathed a sigh of relief.  I knew she had quality tastes and interests.”

Rizzo, whose pre-Embers guitar work typically involved fuzzy distortion and power riffs, sees his eventual musical evolution as a natural one.  In the 90’s, he played guitar for a scrappy punk band called Garden Variety.  Listening to the group’s 1997 self-titled release, one notices two things: first, that Rizzo’s guitar work stands out; second, that the oft-derided crudity of punk rock was, for Garden Variety, effectively mitigated by an attention to melody and momentum.

“I was into punk,” Rizzo says, “but I was into the spirit of punk, not the sound of it.”  He recalls once seeing a bill that listed hardcore punk pioneers Black Flag alongside hillbilly wailer Dwight Yoakum.  “They were radically different if you just hear the sound,” Rizzo says, “but the spirit was the same.”  Rizzo cites Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, and Elvis Presley as other country stars with the punk spirit.  No wonder, then, that Little Embers treads so assuredly in the footsteps of these cultural outlaws.

A common thread that connects the classic country sound with the melodic post-punk recordings of Paul Westerberg and the Replacements is the construction of clever, original songs around a simple chord progression.  “My skills on the guitar aren’t that great,” Hoffmann modestly declares.  “But that’s OK, because it’s about the lyrics and the melody that goes with them.  You know, it’s about what story the song is telling.”

A wide range of experiences inspires Hoffmann’s compositions, and her catalog is by no means simply a collection of marital complaints or love letters set to music.  One song expresses the awe felt during a rock-climbing trip at Joshua Tree National Park, another reflects on a family member’s divorce, still others explore reactions to stories heard through the media.  What ties the songs together is the attention that Hoffmann pays to lyrical precision and the deft arrangements that Rizzo provides.

“Sometimes I’ll be asleep,” Rizzo says, “and I’ll wake up hearing Theresa writing in the next room.  So I’ll start writing parts in my head to go with whatever she’s playing.”

“I trust Anthony enough, even if I’m resistant, to give his ideas a chance,” says Hoffmann.  “I know he has something to offer.”

The fact that Rizzo and Hoffmann have different areas of expertise helps to ease the usual creative tensions.  “I’m not a songwriter,” Rizzo says.  “So it’s good because we’re coming to the table with two different things.  There’s nothing worse than getting up to play with someone and cringing when you hear their lyrics.  I’m very lucky not to have that issue with Theresa.”

Rizzo’s effusive praise may nonetheless have understated his wife’s lyrical talents.  Her poetry is full of ambient concepts, wit, and creative structures.  She doesn’t lean on end rhyme if it doesn’t come naturally to what she’s trying to say.  And her imagery –  “vultures stain my sky” – can be chilling.

“For me, music has always been a collaborative thing,” Rizzo says.  “You have to pass the ball around, and know when to take it back.  It can’t become a cock-fight.”

Hoffmann chimes in, “Especially since I don’t have one of those.”

Another band fronted by a married couple, Sonic Youth, often sounded as if they were singing about their marriage even when they weren’t.  Particularly on the album Rather Ripped, the monotonous drone of the vocals and the lumbering bare-bones arrangements embodied a culturally prominent cynicism about long-term monogamy – that it’s boring, repetitive, soul-sucking, and devoid of any color or excitement.

Little Embers, on the other hand, could pass an entire set without giving the slightest indication that the two lead musicians were romantically involved.  That is, except for the jokes that Hoffmann peppers throughout the set:  “Anthony Rizzo on guitar – also playing the very demanding role of my husband.  It’s a full-time job, people.”  “No kissing on stage.  I thought we talked about this.”

Still, on “To The Loo,” Hoffmann shows an attitude toward marriage that runs contrary to the one conveyed by Sonic Youth clunkers like “Sleepin Around.”  The tune is so country-fried that it would be hokey if written about the usual country music clichés.  Instead, the lyrical content is a firm tip of the hat to the rebellious end of the country bar – more “Family Tradition” than “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.”

Imagining a couple in their twilight years, Hoffmann gets a little naughty: “That purple pill has helped us, yeah we still turn it up.  It takes a while to get there, but that can be a plus.  All the kids have left us; the golden years arrived.  I wonder what they’d think if they had heard us last night.”  It’s an oddly idealistic, romantic view of love and marriage that perfectly suits Hoffmann’s musical style and personality.  And the barn-dance country groove allows Rizzo to bend the strings and exercise the part of his brain that’s wired for twang.

Rizzo gives attention to the music first.  “Everything should be in the service of the music,” he says.  For such a talented and nimble guitarist, Rizzo folds his playing neatly into the larger scheme of Hoffmann’s songs.  He’s playing to fill the gaps, to elevate his wife’s vocals, to embellish the melodies ever so gently.

At the LIC Bar on a rainy night in late April, Little Embers took the stage with its new members and definitely made the crowd take notice.  The dimly lit room was packed to capacity.  With the exception of a couple of schmucks at the end of the bar who couldn’t pry their attention away from the baseball game on TV, the patrons all paid close attention to the polished and often poignant performance taking place before their eyes.

The set betrayed a well-honed sense of movement, melody, humor, and dramatic flair.  Hoffmann winced and strained (though she didn’t need to) over the more soulful passages in her lyrics.  Rizzo bobbed up and down, bodily impressing his notes on the crowd just in case they forgot that the piercing, driving accompaniment was coming from him.   And a string of guest musicians and vocal harmonists rotated from the seats to the stage, providing layers of depth to an already rich performance.

As the set drew near to an end, Hoffmann paused to introduce each musician.  The group then launched into “Elope,” a dark, plodding song that opens with a two-chord see-saw underneath Hoffmann’s voice droning “Dim, dim, dim, dim.”  The one-word refrain is an appropriate summation of the song’s tone – “You don’t look at me, you look through me to the other side of the city.  What are we drinking?”

But even the direst of moods can’t subdue what seems like an irrepressible optimism in Hoffmann’s writing.  “Everyday, we will elope our way out of this torrid state we’re in,” she sings.

Then the solos begin – one instrument at a time, each prolonged solo cascading into the next, finally ending with an orgiastic crescendo before the “dim” refrain appears once more.  Coming right on the heels of the introductions, the entire display reeks of showmanship and confidence.  The show is polished enough to take it on the road if, indeed, that was what Little Embers wanted to do.

“Taking it on the road, that would be great,” says Rizzo.  “Especially, you know, because I wouldn’t have to be away from the wife.  But it’s not a top priority right now.”

Hoffmann seconds her husband’s appraisal.  “We want to make the best music we can possibly make,” she says, “and just enjoy making it, recording it, playing it.”

Rizzo adds that while they have goals for the band, “Of course, we also have goals for the marriage.  We want to have a family; we want to get out of Queens.  So that’s always present too.”

The freedom of making music for its own sake has served Little Embers well.  The songs are authentic, original, cleverly arranged, not hurried, and perhaps most importantly, flagrantly joyful.  As long as Little Embers keeps the joy and continues to grace stages around New York City, they should only get better.

As Hoffmann sings, “I’m not fretting, darling, because I’m still fretting chords.”

Courtesy Photo: John Garrett

By Jeff Dooley

John Garrett walks into the bar at Dangerfield’s comedy club on the corner of 61st Street and 1st Avenue. He is dressed in the same way he used to for his former job, as an accountant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, in pressed gray pants and a striped tie. It’s only 8:30 and his 20-minute set doesn’t start for at least another 45 minutes, which could be why Vinnie the bartender and Chario the Maitre d’ are looking at him like they don’t know who the hell he is. Garrett says “Hi, uh, I’m John Garrett.” His words sound forced, unsure of themselves. “I’m the comedian, performing tonight, I’m the guy from Indianapolis …”

Indianapolis! That’s right, they remember, John Garrett, the guy from Indianapolis. They laugh, and Chario, dressed in a short maroon blazer, walks over to him. Chario is an older man, an immigrant from Cypress who began working at Dangerfield’s just six months after Rodney opened it 40 years ago. He’s been reminded of a joke that he wants to share with Garrett. See, Chario has this doctor friend, who one day was performing an exam on a Native American woman. An Indian woman, Chario says. She didn’t have any nipples. The doctor was perplexed, asking her why this was. The woman explained that all of her relatives had the same condition, and in fact, so did all of the people in her tribe. How many members are there, the doctor wanted to know. Around 500, she said. And what do you call yourselves, the doctor asked. The woman answered: The Indian Nippleless 500.

Garrett laughs immediately and uncomfortably. He is polite, not wanting to show Chario any disrespect, but also not wanting anyone watching him to think he’s enjoying it too much. And the truth is that he probably wasn’t. Those jokes aren’t really Garrett’s thing. He’s a clean comedian, a nice Christian boy from the Midwest who went to Notre Dame and hasn’t had a drop of alcohol in roughly 12-and-a-half years (he says the reason is an acid reflux problem). He’s the CPA who traded in his fancy apartment and Infiniti G34 coupe for a $650/month Astoria apartment with wobbly floors.

Garrett has learned a thing or two since moving to New York last fall, taking his clean comedy act to a land of dirty jokes and profanity-laced rants, where raw comedy is not only celebrated, but, for the most part, expected. He has learned to keep his right-of-center political views to himself, to take advantage of his kid-proof act by getting corporate shows, and to use his accounting experience and nice guy persona to network and land the kind of opportunities every comedian hopes for. He has learned how to handle this situation, too, laughing like one of the guys even though he’s out of his comfort zone, doing his best to fit in. His name is John Garrett, he’s a stand-up comic, and he’s not from around here.

–

Six days earlier, Garrett waits for his five-minute set at the Comic Strip to begin. Located at the corner of 82nd Street and 2nd Avenue, the Strip has an alumni wall that features framed baby-faced photographs of Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler and Chris Rock. Garrett, 34, has only been in New York for six months now, but he already performs regularly at the Comic Strip’s Late Night (a series of five-minute sets held at the conclusion of that night’s show). His road here started several years ago, when he was still a part-time comedian working his day job in Milwaukee. Seeking inspiration, he sent a letter to comedian and fellow Notre Dame alum Jimmy Brogan, who at the time was the head writer for the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” Brogan was in the practice of replying to every letter he received, so he gave Garrett a call the same day he got his note. The two kept in touch, and Brogan’s guidance has not only given Garrett confidence but it’s also led to him meeting the likes of Seinfeld and Leno (When Garrett met Leno, backstage before Leno’s set at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, California, Jay was so friendly that Garrett says it was more like he was the celebrity and Leno the unknown. Then Leno joked: “So you’re the new guy, huh? Well, you know the drill” and started unbuckling his pants). Brogan also advised Garrett to drop by the Comic Strip and introduce himself to owner Richie Tienken. Garrett ran into Tienken on the sidewalk as he was leaving the club. Garrett told him who he was and that Jimmy Brogan said hello. Tienken’s eyes lit up: “Jimmy! How is he doing?” He and Garrett chatted for a while, and Tienken asked to see his tape. Garrett dropped it off, and got a call a few days later: Tienken thought he was funny, and he put Garrett on the Late Night roster. “He’s definitely done tremendously well in making contacts and building relationships,” says Keith Alberstadt, a New York-based comedian who first met Garrett when he was a part-time comic in the Midwest. “He’s an adapter.”

It is in this way that Garrett’s business background is an advantage, knowing how to network effectively (the structure he practiced as an accountant also helps with booking gigs and organizing his material) and take advantage of connections. Mike Armstrong, a comedian from Kentucky who used to take Garrett out on the road with him, says, “He’s aggressive as anybody. He’s got a better shot of making it than most because he’s aggressive. Most comics get up at 4 in the afternoon. But John gets up early.”

Garrett enjoys doing sets at Dangerfield’s and the Comic Strip, and he is able to raise his profile as a comic by performing there, but it’s out on the road at corporate appearances where he makes his living. He can pull in anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 for a corporate appearance, which consists of his stand-up geared specifically toward that company, as well as an interactive family feud-style game. It is here that his clean act comes in handy, as does his accounting background. Not only is he not going to say anything that will offend anybody, but he looks and talks like he is one of them.

“By being clean, he has the potential to pick up a whole segment of work that other guys can’t get,” says Stan Stankos, one of Garrett’s friends and fellow comedians. “I don’t think it’s a challenge for him in comedy clubs, either. Sometimes, when the audience is sober and paying attention, you want a clean, sober act up top.”

Garrett (left) with his mentor, Jimmy Brogan

Garrett has impressed his mentors with his improvement over the years. “Every time I see him I just watch him and say, ‘Boy, he’s getting better and better every time,’” says Brogan. “I think he’s on a good path [as a clean comic]. His act can more easily transition to TV that way, and in the corporate world they all want it clean, and that’s really where the money is.” Joey Kola, another comedian who has advised Garrett and currently serves as the warm-up act for several talk shows, including Martha Stewart’s, thinks Garrett has a bright future. “He’s so likeable and vulnerable,” Kola says. “Vulnerability is a good quality in any comedian because you’re able to make fun of yourself as well as anything else. I think he’ll be writing screenplays soon, maybe writing for television.”

At the moment, however, Garrett is busy stressing out about a bunch of college kids. It’s college night here at the Comic Strip, hosted by Judah Friedlander, who looks exactly like he does on “30 Rock” in a bright yellow t-shirt, thick black glasses frames and trucker hat. As drunk college kids mill about and discuss how to split up their bills, Garrett watches with concern as comedian Owen Bowness go on before him. With the student competition over, much of the audience is going to be leaving soon. “They all got their checks,” Garrett says, shaking his head as he looks back at the room. “It sucks.” Right before he goes on, he sits on the edge of a chair and fiddles with his top button.

Once he gets on stage, the distraction of having people walk out in the middle of his jokes seems to be having an effect on him. But he salvages the set with a new bit he’s been working on. “My new favorite thing – and you can do this too, and then I’ll get out of here – my new favorite thing is just throw out random ‘You’re welcomes’ at people,” he says. “Like you’re at church and people say, ‘Peace be with you.’ ‘You’re welcome.’ Today I met a man, he said, ‘Wow, it’s a really nice day outside.’ ‘You’re welcome.’ I walked into a mall going into one of those candle stores, someone said, ‘It smells like cinnamon.’ ‘You’re welcome.’” He continues: “My buddy calls me last week, he goes, ‘My wife is pregnant.’ ‘You’re welcome.’” The few remaining audience members burst out laughing. “The idea with that bit is just to give myself this sort of fake toughness,” Garrett says after the set is over. “Because I’m so nerdy.”

–

Because his birthday falls on April 15, tax day, Garrett suspects that in some ways he was destined to be an accountant. But there were also several things that fell into place and led to his becoming a stand-up comic. After graduating with an accounting degree from Notre Dame, Garrett went to work for Pricewaterhouse Coopers in St. Louis. While on a month-long training session in southern California, John and some co-workers would frequently rent a car and drive to the Hollywood Improv, where the cast of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” would come by after shooting episodes to perform live. A few stand-ups would go on as well. “Some guys were just hilarious,” Garrett says. “But then others were not funny at all. And part of you thinks, ‘Well, I can be as not funny as that guy,’ and this is Hollywood. I live in St. Louis, so things are even not funnier there.”

So Garrett spent a month writing material, then had dinner at his parents’ house the night before he was set to do his first open mic performance. He nervously ran through a list of 40 jokes he was considering, to see what his parents thought. They didn’t laugh at a single one. “I remember that some of the jokes, I didn’t think were very funny,” says Bonnie, John’s mother. “I was nervous they wouldn’t go over very well.” At one point, Garrett recalls his father saying, “We didn’t raise you that way,” about a certain joke. By the next night, however, they had done a 180. “I did the show, and my parents laughed harder than anybody,” Garrett says. “And I was like, ‘Where was this last night, when I was freaking out?’”

Garrett continued to dabble in comedy part time for four years, earning some modest success before, at the urging of a few of his mentors and peers, deciding to drop his corporate job and turn to comedy full-time. After another four years, he pondered moving to New York. His fiancé, Jenni Maple, recalls talking to Garrett about the move while she was volunteering in Uganda, via a spotty phone connection. “I could just tell he was really excited about the possibility of living here,” Maple says. “He was waiting to see if he could really make a go of it, but he was more than ready.” Garrett moved to the city in October of last year.

–

Garrett says he keeps his act clean because it better reflects who he is in real life. He doesn’t swear, he goes to church every Sunday, and his political views are conservative. Also, he avoids engaging in the behavior some of his colleagues do. When he was first starting out, he served as an emcee for a show in Milwaukee. When it was over, the comics invited him back to the green room where they were all smoking marijuana, and asked him to join. Garrett passed, but the headliner of that night’s show continued to offer him drugs, telling him that he attributed his rise to headliner status to the fact that he started doing mushrooms. “It’s part of the business,” he told Garrett. On his two-hour drive back home, Garrett says he told himself, “I really hope it’s not, because I don’t do that.”

Garrett says he tries to avoid talking about religion and politics, insisting that he doesn’t mind what others choose to do, but Armstrong says that Garrett occasionally did engage in political discussions when he was starting out that would lead to arguments with other comedians. “He was giving his political view too much, and that would rub some people the wrong way,” Armstrong says. “Because almost everyone in our business is a liberal, and he’s a conservative Republican. Even Rush Limbaugh would look at some of the things John said and say ‘Yikes.’” Garrett maintains he’s never had anything more than a calm discussion with fellow comics about politics.

“I am religious,” Garrett says. “My act is clean, but that’s a lot just because of who I am. In comedy, it’s really important to be close to who you are in person. When I swear, it’s like when a seven-year-old swears. If I drop an F-bomb on stage, it’s like, ‘That’s so adorable!’”

Garrett says this as he’s picking at his cheeseburger at Michael’s, a diner in a quiet stretch of Astoria, just a few blocks from Garrett’s apartment. The waitress comes up to the table and asks to take away the bottle of ketchup to a customer at another table. Garrett says that it’s no problem. “Such nice manners,” she hollers as she walks back toward the kitchen. “Not from New York originally.” Garrett laughs. “There you go,” he says.

–

Garrett’s set at Dangerfield’s is not going well. There hadn’t been a lot of laughing going on during the first comedian’s set, while Garrett waited for his time to start. “Performing is the best part of all of this, for those moments you get up on stage,” he had said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, rocking nervously back and forth. Now here he is, in front of the black felt backdrop with “Dangerfields” spelled out in white letters, with both hands firmly clasping the top of the microphone stand as though he’s throttling its neck in the hope that laughs will come flowing out. But they don’t. He’s stopping bits and not finishing them, only to return to them and set them up again later on in his act, and a couple of wise asses in the audience aren’t making things any easier. After his 20 minutes are up, he passes the mic off to Quentin Heggs, the emcee for the night, and retreats back to the bar. “That room is tough,” he says. “I had some momentum going there for awhile, and then – nothing.” Garrett is sure to collect his $25 before leaving to catch the NW subway to his Astoria apartment.

–

Courtesy Photo: John Garrett

Every comedian has bad shows. The important part is being able to learn what jokes work with which audiences, and then bounce back well enough to be ready for the next one. “It’s not like you’re in a foxhole,” says Dan Davidson, a comedian friend of Garrett’s. “You go in there, you try to make people chuckle, and sometimes you chew on it. You try not to let the bad shows get to you. John is pretty good at putting those past him.”

It certainly seems that way. Eight days later, he bounds into the Comic Strip an hour before his Late Night set is ready to begin, his red backpack tightly secured over both of his shoulders. Tonight has been a good night for Garrett. He was watching a show at Gotham Comedy Club and ended up meeting Eddie Brill, the booker for the “Late Show with David Letterman.” Brill asked him to send over a tape for him to watch, something Garrett promises to do before the end of the week. Then he got a last-minute set at Dangerfield’s, and this one was much better than last week. The crowd was more lively, he got lots of good laughs, and he was able to work on some of his new material. Upon arriving at the Strip, he immediately rushes up to friend Sam Morril to give him a congratulatory hug for winning the Comix Comedy Club’s stand-up competition. He jokes around with a few other comics before putting his bag down.

“It’s funny how these things work,” Garrett says. “It’s so inconsistent. The same night, the same jokes, you can get just a completely different response. It’s hard to stay on an even keel, especially when you’re new, because you can catch a break and all of a sudden you’re on a rocket ship. And then the next day, that person who was going to give you that break says ‘I’ve never heard of you,’ so then you’re down below where you were before. That’s why I never try to get too high, and never get too low. I just stay pretty even-keeled.”

Once he gets on stage, Garrett looks very much at ease. His delivery is smooth, he’s getting lots of laughs, and he covers for the bits that aren’t working by making fun of himself. The crowd really seems to enjoy one of his older jokes. “I ran a half-marathon last year, 13.1 miles. That was pretty fun.” The audience applauds. “It started out as a full-marathon –” the crowd cracks up, so loudly that his next few lines are muffled. He continues, “I’m not a great runner, either. I found out by the time I finished, the winner, already back in Kenya.” The audience laughs again, and he ends with the “You’re Welcome” bit to wrap things up. “My name’s John Garrett, you guys have been great.”

When Garrett returns to the bar area, his fellow comedian Joe Machi comes up to him. Apparently, Machi also has a joke that involves a Kenyan marathoner, and he feels as though he can no longer use it. Machi walks away looking flustered. Garrett is concerned, and begins discussing the issue with comedian Adam Cozens. “It’s got a different punch,” Garrett explains. “It’s a completely different joke.” He continues: “I’ve been doing that joke for a year-and-a-half now, I can show him the tapes if he wants.” Garrett looks worried. “It’s just that he seems upset about it, and I don’t want him to be mad at me. Maybe we should sit down and talk about it or something, because I don’t wanna –” He stops himself, forces a smile to his lips and quietly adds, “Maybe I’ll just have to make out with him.”

Cozens nods, and looks at him before responding flatly: “I think you’ll have to sip on his dick.”

“Sip?” Garrett asks in disbelief. He smiles and shakes his head, his nose crinkled, his upper lip sneering. “Really?”

Wally Marzano-Lesnevich describes the current condition of the screenplays he’s writing as “the first half I like, the second half don’t exist.”   It’s perhaps an apt situation for the creations of an artist who is himself perpetually on his way toward something he hasn’t yet reached.  Not quite a young man anymore at 32 (he laments losing parts to actors “a little bit younger, a little bit cuter”), Marzano-Lesnevich hopes ultimately to act in his own screenplays.  Currently, though, the screenwriting career is embryonic, while the acting is essentially a part-time enterprise as he focuses on the writing from an office outside New York.

And yet, New York itself may be only a waypoint for this suburban New Jersey native.  Marzano-Lesnevich says he hopes his work will take him back to Los Angeles, to which he’s already moved twice, only to return to what he admits is a comfort zone in Manhattan, close not only to his family but also to some of his classmates from Rutgers, where he earned a B.A. in theater from the Mason Gross School of the Arts.  Although the theater company he co-founded with some of those classmates dissolved several years ago, Marzano-Lesnevich still keeps his hand in in live theater as he tries to promote his writing.  He recently earned a part in a small play, Sex, Relationships & Sometimes Love at The Producer’s Club in Manhattan; unfortunately, like his screenplays, that story only goes halfway.  Several days into the rehearsal process, Marzano-Lesnevich left the cast, along with a few other actors, over artistic differences with the directors.

Like the Everymen he often writes, Marzano-Lesnevich could easily be Everyartist on the New York (or Los Angeles) scene.  His acting, directing and writing efforts to date have been met with resounding indifference, but he keeps trying, hoping for the break that will make him a success.  His many collaborators hope that the man they laud as both a talented artist and a friend will find that success.  Right now, though, he’s the artistic equivalent of the man in the grey flannel suit, with a professional anonymity that can make it easy to overlook the individual inside the “struggling artist” stereotype.

Marzano-Lesnevich is nothing if not multi-talented; one of his two projects closest to fruition is a web series he wrote (targeted to start in May) in which he’ll also act in a part he describes as a “clueless young lawyer.”  (Whatever other influences his lawyer parents and their work have had on him, Marzano-Lesnevich writes plenty of lawyer characters into his scripts.)  The other is a short film he co-wrote and plans to co-direct.  He’s also been a producer, with the aforementioned theater company, along with all the other dirty work putting on a stage play entails.  (Some of that dirty work is more literal than others; one colleague recalls a production in which the stage was literally covered in dirt to provide atmosphere, and the production team had to clean it up after the show.)  Ultimately, he says, “I hope to act in things that I write.”

Unspoken in all of Marzano-Lesnevich’s different roles is the question of whether he has enough talent in any one of those areas to make a career of it.  The web shows he’s appeared in so far show an actor with some presence and a resonant voice, but little to make him stand out from the pack.  His screenplays can lapse into generic characterizations—oversexed cheerleaders and thirtysomething women worried about losing their youth.  Flashes of clever dialogue and plotting—an ultra-wired technology executive who crashes the entire internet—may or may not prove enough to get one of them picked up.  Until then, Marzano-Lesnevich floats in a limbo of largely undistinguished artists trying to get noticed.

While Marzano-Lesnevich himself wonders if he isn’t hurting his own cause by diversifying his work to as great an extent as he does, he and others do see some benefits to his breadth of experience.  Several actors whom he’s directed say that they enjoy working with him precisely because he has been an actor himself, and thus understands the process they’re going through.  His acting background also keeps him from unilaterally imposing his own directorial vision on an actor, a directing style he cites as the major reason for his leaving Sex, Relationships & Sometimes Love. As several of his colleagues have noted, he appreciates other people’s work more because whatever the job, Marzano-Lesnevich’s probably tried it himself and learned how difficult it can be.

The corollary to all this is that Marzano-Lesnevich takes his work very seriously, another quality for which his colleagues praise him.  Screenwriting collaborator Jason Gareffa lauds his ability, as a writer, to keep “chipping away at a certain scene” as he “strives to find the best version” of any project he works on.  Sometimes, though, his dedication to his work can outstrip his collaborators’ patience.  After Gareffa got married in 2008, he says, “Wally was so tickled with all my different stories about married life that he kept a manila folder handy, and every time I would recount something, he would immediately jot it down…and put it in the file.”  Eventually, Gareffa recounts, he was forced to ask, “Wally, will you stop writing down my life?”

Like any aspiring actor, Marzano-Lesnevich understands that dedication—not to mention a tolerance for absurdity—is indispensable in making it as a performing artist.  “It’s very strange,” he observes, “when you’re dragging your bed onto a theater in New York, your actual bed, because it’s going to be the main set for the play, and as a result you’re going to be living with your parents for a couple of weeks while the play is running.”  “But,” he adds, “it’s fun to at least try to keep a sense…of humor about it.”

For Marzano-Lesnevich, a sense of humor is a stock in trade.  Although he agrees with the conventional wisdom that calls it “probably the hardest thing to write,” his writing efforts have focused on comedy.  His colleagues say it’s a good decision.  Ben Barham, a former acting colleague, says, “He does highbrow humor well, which isn’t common.”  Nick Garfinkle, a writer who has worked with him, adds that Marzano-Lesnevich has a talent for mixing high and low comedy.  Despite this praise, many of his current screenplays skew heavily to the lowbrow end of the spectrum.  And, of course, for all the virtues his fellow writers see in him, even the screenplays he has completed have yet to be produced.

At the moment, Marzano-Lesnevich is living with his parents in his old hometown of Tenafly, New Jersey, while trying to make his screenwriting a success out of an office in nearby Hackensack.  In traditional performing-arts fashion, he’s also working at the restaurant of a family friend to help pay the bills.  On the issue of supporting an artistic career that has yet to get off the ground, Marzano-Lesnevich commends his family, saying that they’ve been invaluable for both emotional and financial backing.  As his father, Walter Lesnevich, puts it, for the family it’s “an accepted fact that he’s going to succeed.”

Marzano-Lesnevich’s most significant achievement as an artist was also, arguably, the most prominent example of his work not reaching its conclusion.  In 2002, he and several of his Mason Gross classmates started the wheels in motion that led to their co-founding the Drove Theater Company in Manhattan.  At first, says co-founder Frank Sallo, the plan was just to produce a play, to give themselves opportunities to display their own work as actors or producers or directors.  The production in question, of Steven Dietz’s God’s Country, was sufficiently well-received that the group “basically broke even” on a budget of better than $10,000, according to another co-founder, Michael Hampton.  At that point, they realized that while they had all enjoyed the opportunity, producing a play was a tremendous amount of work.  As such, if they were going to continue, they needed to do it right, as a formally constructed company; thus, the birth of the Drove.  Hampton attempts to explain the name by saying that in American history, people are always said to have moved west in droves; the theater company, he says, “was our drove.”

The early days of the Drove provided a crucial moment in Marzano-Lesnevich’s development as an actor.  The company was producing John Patrick Shanley’s The Big Funk, with Marzano-Lesnevich in a leading role that required him to deliver a key monologue while standing on stage completely nude.  Hampton praises Marzano-Lesnevich’s professionalism in dealing with the naturally uncomfortable moment; when the scene was being blocked in rehearsals, and Marzano-Lesnevich would have to deliver the monologue in front of the cast for the first time—a cast consisting not just of Marzano-Lesnevich’s Rutgers cohorts, but also of several actors he barely knew—Marzano-Lesnevich came on stage naked and “just did it,” as Hampton recalls.  For Marzano-Lesnevich, getting through the performances of the play was a watershed.  “Once you’ve done that as an actor,” he says, “you can do fucking anything.”

The members of the Drove have a variety of perspectives on why the company dissolved, and dissolved when it did.  Marzano-Lesnevich himself cites the Drove’s struggle to find an identity as a company.  “We were never really on the same page,” he says, “about what kind of plays we wanted to produce.”  Barham sees this issue as particularly critical, arguing that the company couldn’t survive by producing shows that had already been performed; only by moving into a regime of producing new plays, he felt, could it establish itself as a legitimate enterprise.  At the same time, Marzano and others were realizing that they didn’t necessarily want this company to be the focus of their lives.  Hampton recalls, “When Wally stepped back is when the whole thing fell apart.”  Eventually, the desertions reached a point at which Hampton realized he’d be the only one left to run the company, at which point the Drove ceased to exist.

As the Drove disbanded, Marzano-Lesnevich made his second foray to Los Angeles; his first had ended after just six months with Marzano-Lesnevich “push[ing] the panic button” and returning to New York.  He stayed this time for four years, trying to act (with very little success) and establish himself as a screenwriter (with only slightly more).  It was at this stage that Marzano-Lesnevich began to take advatage of the power of the Internet to help get his name out, writing and acting in a pair of self-produced web series:  “The Wally Show” and “Pretentiously L.A.”  Both consisted of short, comic episodes with the actors largely speaking to the camera; neither had production values much above the rank-and-file of YouTube, nor consistently funny writing.

While Marzano-Lesnevich’s work might be dismissed as that of any generic aspiring actor, his colleagues say that working with him has shown that he brings some things to the table that they haven’t seen from other actors or writers.  Some of his greatest assets, they argue, include skills not typically associated with artists at all.  They universally praise his facility with the business side of the arts; those who worked with him at the Drove say that without his talent for navigating the mechanics of non-profit applications and fundraising, the company would never have survived as long as it did.  One of his Drove associates, Barham, suggests that Marzano-Lesnevich would make an excellent producer; Marzano-Lesnevich’s father also sees his son’s greatest strength as his ability to organize and direct groups of artists.  Nonetheless, Marzano-Lesnevich has shown little inclination to pursue that aspect of his career.

More typical of an actor is Marzano-Lesnevich’s talent for charming people and making friends.  Several friends and colleagues tell stories of introducing Marzano-Lesnevich to their own friends that frequently end, as one of Barham’s does, with “and now Wally’s going to be at that guy’s wedding next month.”  Moreover, once he makes friends, he keeps them; Barham also notes that if it weren’t for Marzano-Lesnevich’s attentiveness to keeping in touch, they’d probably have drifted apart after the dissolution of the Drove.  Jesse Bernstein, a director who has worked with Marzano-Lesnevich, calls him “incredibly giving of his time and energy.”  Diane Davis and Marzano-Lesnevich have been friends since high school; now they’re screenwriting collaborators  Davis is effusive in her praise for Marzano-Lesnevich’s dedication to his friends.  An actress by trade, she says he’s “seen almost every show that I’ve been in,” even when he’s had to travel from New York to Boston to do it.  She adds, “I hope I’ve been as supportive of him and his work as he is of mine.”  As for Marzano-Lesnevich himself, he doesn’t see his behavior as anything out of the ordinary, but his stories speak for themselves.  He describes his travel schedule to attend a high-school friend’s wedding in Montana, which involved going “from Nantucket to Boston to Minnesota to Bozeman, rented a car and drove an hour to Hot Springs,” all in one day.  But, as he says, the groom is “a good old friend.”

Unfortunately for Marzano-Lesnevich, his ability to follow through on friendships has yet to translate into an ability to complete a major artistic project.  It remains to be seen whether the networks he’s already built will help him gain the recognition he hopes for.  Until then, like the characters he creates, Marzano-Lesnevich will have to wait for the end of his story to be written.

Sali Taylor at work in her studio

By Karina Taveras

Tucked away in a quiet studio in what seems to be miles from the bustling energy of Midtown Manhattan’s Fashion District, the artist Sali Taylor stands before a large canvas.  Her hands hover over a deconstructed image of Scarlett Johansson that looks out menacingly, as she tries to figure out where to position a string of blue sequins on her body. The actress’ trademark curls and curves abound, except for lips and hair extensions that have been attached to her face and neck, cut up from someone else’s picture. Also different is the fact that she’s been rendered like a negative photograph in hues of turquoise blues, looking eerie and ethereal with hollowed eyes and mouth. To make her art, Taylor scavenges magazine photographs, cuts them up and reassembles them to create distorted images of celebrities and models, most of whom are flawlessly portrayed and frequently grace the pages of the printed media publications of today. Her unique montages combine contemporary images extracted from today’s visual culture with her profound knowledge of art history.

One would think that a person who spends her time looking through women’s magazines would have some kind of glamour girl or fashionista disposition. But for Taylor, 62, the obsession with the image ends where her work begins.

Taylor was chosen to represent the U.S. last August at the 2009 Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale in South Korea, an international event showcasing female artists’ work from around the globe. Here she presented pieces from her “Becoming Venus Series”, which combined modern beauty icons with classical representations of feminine beauty. She has been covered critically in New York arts publications, such as M in the Art World and d’Art International, and will be presenting pieces from her latest series and some of her newer work in an upcoming show on June 17^th, 2010 in Gallery Nine5, in Chelsea.

On a brisk Friday afternoon in April, Taylor couldn’t have looked more down-to-earth. A cross between a Vermont farmer and a yoga teacher, she sported a flannel shirt that hung loosely over her girlish figure. Her short hair was gray and wispy, with gentle blue eyes gazing out through a pair of chunky glasses.

“There’s a poignancy in seeing that women really want something,” she said, plopping down next to the canvas she had been working on and a large table strewn with cut-up images of Reese Witherspoon, Tiana and the Venus de Milo.  “Women pick up a fashion magazine to relax and end up feeling worse about themselves,” she continued.  It’s surprising that someone so laid back about her own image devours women’s lifestyle and fashion magazines to create the essence of her work. However, the kind of work that Taylor does is a reaction to what’s happening in her immediate surroundings. As fickle as it is, to this artist the women’s media industry is a source of inspiration for work that comments and reflects on society’s distorted depiction of female beauty.

Artists such as Taylor are commenting on the feminine ideal represented in today’s society. Not only are women increasingly feeling the pressure to excel at work and at home as wives and mothers, but at the same time, they need to meet society’s expectations of physical beauty. Through her work, Taylor denounces the unrealistic standards of physical perfection imposed by the media, addressing the use of pin-thin models in the fashion industry and the abusive use of Photoshop in digital manipulation of female images in the media.

Taylor’s work can be defined as appropriation art. Appropriation art borrows and incorporates images from society’s visual culture to produce a new creative work, like Marcel Duchamp did with his readymades and Andy Warhol with his Campbell Soup Cans. Recently, it has become more common in contemporary art circles, as digital artists repurpose technology such as computer software and video games in their creative work.

Jennifer Berger from Gallery Nine5, which is currently exhibiting Taylor’s pieces, described her work. “Aesthetically her work is really well done and complex, there’s theoretical depth in her artwork with portrayals of women throughout art history, ancient sculptures depicting the feminine against today’s commercial representations.”

Before arriving in New York 11 years ago, Taylor lived and worked in Weathersfield, Vermont (population 2,500). Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she moved to Vermont at the age of 12 and lived there throughout the most part of her life. She majored in painting at the University of Colorado and received an M.A. in Art History. Back in Vermont, she tended a farm and focused her artwork on mandalas, Buddhist meditation tools that help focus and take a person deeper into meditation. As a practicing meditator, Taylor focused on work that commented on Eastern spiritual traditions, the complexities of the mind and our relationship with immaterial theories of reality. In series such as “Forces of Nature”, “Wounds and Wombs” and “String Theory”, she used a different kind of appropriation technique, resorting to natural elements and combining objects such as an oyster shell, roots and hand-made paper on one piece and a wasp nest, wax and thread on another.

Her husband Eric Taylor, a floppy-haired documentary filmmaker who’s shared her life for over 40 years and is a creative himself, describes her creativity as “mercurial”. In Vermont, he explained, her work tended to be very spiritual. But once they returned to New York, it became more social. “She’s been captivated by fashion throughout the past few years. I don’t know how much longer it’s going to last but she’s been really committed.”

The couple had moved to New York once before in 1981, due to Eric’s filmmaking career, settling in a loft space on the fringes of Hell’s Kitchen. With two young sons at the time, the neighborhood was a difficult place to raise a family.  So they decided to move upstate to Westchester County. Even throughout this time, Taylor worked on her art, relying on watercolors because it was “the fastest medium”. Her two sons, Nate and Jake live in the Upper West Side and Maryland, respectively. Nate, 34, is a filmmaker like his Dad and Jake, 32, a theorist in technology who works in Washington D.C.

After arriving in New York and finding flagrant consumption distorting the spiritual values, which had dominated her work, she began to question its driving forces. She recognized that the media was attempting to foster feelings of shame and guilt in women, while undermining their sense of self-worth. “When I got to NY and saw that women were carrying thirteen thousand dollar bags, I knew there was a problem,” she said.

She returned to appropriation, except that this time she replaced rocks and thread with celebrity images and female iconography from pop culture. Thumbing through pages of glossies like Marie Claire and Vogue, she looks for images that grab her attention. She relies on an intuitive approach, fitting together images she comes across that may seem to have nothing to do with each other. “A lot of the time I don’t know how they’ll be used but they’ll be used for something,” she said, demonstrating her organic process as she stands behind a sliver of cleared space in her studio and fidgets with a bright blue snorkeling mask and a cut-out of Sarah Palin’s head.

This marks the beginning of her creative process. She assembles new images out of those she has cut out and collected. If she anticipates adding other elements to the montage or working on a larger scope, she relies on a printer in Vermont who reproduces the image to a specific size. Once the print is ready, she attaches it to the canvas and continues adding elements, which usually include other cutout images, string, hair, oil or wax. The technique she uses to add wax, known as encaustic painting, creates a 3D effect that can be polished to a high sheen.

The Greek and Roman images of antiquity that Taylor incorporates into her work are produced in encaustic. Iconic female images like the androgynous Cycladic figure and the voluptuous Venus of Willendorf are juxtaposed against contemporary images, creating a unique commentary on the female body.

In her latest “Cycladic Series”, Taylor incorporates the narrow Cycladic figure in modern-day settings. In “Jump” (2008), for example, Taylor combines a leaping contemporary model in a designer swimsuit next to an encaustic version of the Cycladic figure clad in a skimpy bikini. This collection of works, she confirms, is a “mischievous merging of high art and pop culture whose intention is to comment on an ever-changing ‘feminine’ aesthetic.”

An important event marked Taylor’s work in 2006, with the death of two South American models Luisel Ramos and Ana Carolina Reston, who both died from starvation within a few months of each other. Prior to that, she had been producing installations that incorporated some of the natural elements that had been present in her art in Vermont, under the title “It’s Perfectly Safe to Stand Nowhere”. When this tragedy occurred, Taylor experienced shock at seeing something like this happening to a woman from Brazil, a country that reveres the female form and celebrates the body. This led her to start questioning the media’s power to influence a woman’s self-image and self-esteem, and began seeing a woman’s sense of self as a product of the times.

The iconic 1960’s model Twiggy introduced the waif look, which Kate Moss reintroduced into the media world in the 1990’s, and is still very visible today. It is this pin-thin aesthetic that Taylor presents throughout the many pieces of her work, showing the similarities that exist between the classic Cycladic figure and today’s idealized female form. In the September 2009 issue of Glamour magazine, however, a different kind of model made it into the pages of the glossy. Lizzie Miller, a plus-sized model appeared almost nude in the pages of the magazine, sparking controversy throughout the fashion world. Her size 12 physique (a plus-size model could be a U.S. size 8, 10 or 12, despite the fact that those sizes are not considered “plus” by clothing manufacturers) was a marked departure from the pin-thin models of the fashion world. Miller’s body more closely resembled that of a normal sized woman. While the fashion world was outraged, readers of the magazine embraced the image, commenting how they could finally identify with a model in a magazine and pleased to see a normal-looking beautiful woman featured in print.

Taylor reacted to this image in her work. She’s chosen to focus her latest work on Scarlett Johansson, one of the few Hollywood actresses who advocates for a healthy lifestyle and body image. In past montages, she’s also incorporated female images from the Dove Campaign For Real Beauty, an initiative in the media dedicated to helping young girls build a better relationship with their self-image and self-esteem. Taylor has been able to capture how society seems to be accepting these “new” ideals of the female form.  Yet even though she feels hopeful for this change, she’s still skeptical.

“It’s not real, it’s not changing, but at least awareness is there, this has been planted,” said Taylor.

Looking thin in real life is one thing, but using technology to exaggerate this thinness is another. Lately, it seems that everywhere you turn to models and celebrities are being digitally altered. In October 2009, a model in a Ralph Lauren ad appeared with a freakishly narrow waist. From then on, more and more attention has been paid to the way images are digitally manipulated by the media. Taylor has been experimenting with Photoshop herself, exploring the way it is being abused by the media and the way it can open up possibilities to a visual artist like herself.

“I think a new dialogue has started,” she said. She believes that although the difficult economic situation has impacted the U.S. in a big way and people are struggling, it has forced people to start to discover new ways of being in the world. “This is a good time for other ideas to be introduced.” By this, she alludes to a shift in values, moving away from the consumer-oriented society that we’ve been until now. She feels optimistic about important social changes, changes that have taken effect in politics and are now opening new doors for women. Yet, she believes that the empowerment of women has been tough on established norms and because of this, women are constantly being driven and judged.

“As a feminist and someone who grew up in the 60’s, those women who go to clubs are out of control,” she said, referring to the women who strut around in 4-inch heels and skirts so tight they can barely walk. To her, these women are becoming victims of style and fashion, becoming oppressed by the “bondage” of today.

Back in her studio, as Taylor works, she appears relaxed and pleased to be following her life’s passion. “She really becomes her full self when she does her artwork,” said Eric, who recognizes that it’s difficult to find a quiet place to work in the city. Yet Taylor has.  Taylor’s studio is part of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. The EFA Studio Program is located in a pre-war building on 39th street, providing affordable studio space and seeking to establish a community of artists. Taylor, who applied to the competitive program in 2005, just recently was approved for a two-year renewal of her lease.

“The artists here seek to be a part of something larger,” said Francine Kay, Director of the EFA Studios, which house 80 artist studios. She takes pride in the fact that all of the artists that are part of the community come from very different backgrounds and work in various subject matter and styles. Kay defined Taylor as a “positive member” of the community, actively involved in the events that take place in the program as well as a friend and mentor to other members

An individual like Taylor, who has a vibrant inner life, is able to balance the chaos of the environment she’s in. She doesn’t ignore this chaos, but uses it to fuel her work. Yet, she’s able to stay true to herself and see things such as the fashion industry, which often takes itself so seriously, with a sense of humor.

Taylor is still trying to decide where to place the sequins on the canvas. She stretches the blue string from a point between Johansson’s breasts to an image of a little girl with pigtails, looking over from the corner of the canvas. Clad in a red coat, she appears uncomfortable, afraid.

“Poor thing,” said Taylor earnestly, as if comforting the little girl.

Kelsey Fuhrman needs to be at Penn Plaza in the next eleven minutes. She moves efficiently around her tiny, messy apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, grabbing black tights, white canvas Keds sneakers, a pair of silver Nike runners, makeup remover, deodorant, hairspray, a yellow t-shirt, an iPod.  She shoves it all into a black leather bag on the bed, above which, in the place of honor, hangs a poster of Michael Jackson from the Bad World Tour. She checks her phone and does a quick calculation. She now has nine minutes to travel 21 blocks.

“What else do I need?” she asks herself. Her right hand reaches up to fluff her edgy asymmetrical bob, an unconscious gesture that she repeats every half-minute. She runs through her day to make sure she has everything.

“A top and boots for the audition. I need sweats for the gym. I can dance in socks at the studio. And then clothes for rehearsal? Fine. Let’s go.”

Her staccato footsteps echo down the stairwell as she runs five flights to the street. Out on 10th Avenue, she jumps into a taxi, greeting the driver with a cheery, “Hi! How are you?” before giving him directions. She checks her makeup, and makes sure her nose-ring is secure before collapsing back against the seat. She’ll make it in time to audition for what dancers call an industrial – a job dancing for a corporate client. If she gets this gig, she’ll dance for two hours next Thursday in the handbag section on the first floor of the Macy’s store at Herald Square.

“All this for $150 and two outfits,” she says with a good-natured snort and a smile. Fuhrman’s large blue eyes and pale skin make her look quiet and innocent until one of these grins completely overtakes her face.

She is in constant motion. When she watches television, her foot taps against the coffee table to some internal rhythm. When she speaks, she bounces from topic to topic and interrupts her own flow of words.  She has lived in five apartments in the five years she has been in New York.  She has had, in rapid succession, a variety of different jobs as a hip-hop dancer: She has danced in music videos and an MTV television series called Dances From Tha Hood. She has danced in underground shows staged by dancers and choreographers who rent out nightclubs and halls for an evening. She has choreographed for the New York Knicks dancers and danced for the New York Titans lacrosse team.

This week – a fairly average one – Fuhrman will have five rehearsals: three for an underground hip-hop show she’s in next Tuesday, and two for a paid gig in Nebraska in June. She will take two hip-hop classes and a street jazz class. She will rent out a studio in Chelsea for to work on some of her own choreography.  She will do three shifts at a downtown restaurant to ensure she’ll make rent and she will work three hours at a dance studio to earn herself discounted classes. She will help run an audition for male dancers, and go on two other auditions. And, because she will get the job that this taxi is currently hurtling through traffic for, she will spend two hours bopping around on a podium at Macy’s to inaugurate a new line of purses and accessories. “I never stop moving,” Fuhrman says. But she isn’t always sure what she’s moving towards.

–

Ballet dancers know what they’re striving for; in ballet companies, the strict hierarchy of corps, soloists and principals makes the ultimate goal clear.  Modern dance companies, though sometimes less formally stratified, mostly work the same way. Ballroom dancers measure achievement in international competition titles. Dancers in the theater world dream of being in a Broadway hit.  But to be a hip-hop dancer is to never quite know what success is supposed to look like.

The most in-demand jobs in the commercial hip-hop industry are those dancing behind mainstream pop, hip-hop and R+B stars. Yet many hip-hop dancers – Fuhrman included – are dissatisfied that the pinnacle of achievement in their industry is all about making someone else look good.  “I would love to be dancing behind Britney Spears or Janet Jackson – but then I don’t like to be in the background,” she says. “I like to be in the spotlight.” She adds that, because pop concerts are about the headliner, the choreography isn’t usually cutting-edge, or even particularly challenging.

Television shows like So You Think You Can Dance” and America’s Best Dance Crew make the dancers the center of attention. If fame is tantamount to success, then being a finalist on one of these shows seems like something to strive for. But the celebrity is not self-sustaining; after the end of a season, it’s rare to hear about those dancers again apart from additional appearances on the same competition reality-TV circuit. When hip-hop dancers do achieve household-name status, it’s generally not because of their performances; Shane Sparks and Wade Robson made their names when they began choreographing, and Jennifer Lopez and Madonna, when they began to focus on music and acting.

Moreover, doing simplified choreography in the service of a pop star or doing commercially-friendly choreography on a network television show can earn a dancer derision from the underground hip-hop community from whom most of the innovations in style stem. To be successful in the underground is to be at the forefront of the hip-hop’s developments, but unable to support oneself financially.

In both her relentless work ethic and her disappointment with the image of success, Fuhrman represents hundreds of other young dancers who move to New York or Los Angeles to try and make it as a hip-hop dancer. But she rarely focuses on the big-picture problems in her daily whirl of activity. Her constant movement is a kind of insurance policy: If she can work hard enough, perhaps what she’s working for will become clearer. But she is constantly aware that time is passing, and that time in which a dancer can build and sustain a career is crushingly short. “I’m 23,” she says, half-joking. “I’m getting old!”

–

The heart of New York’s commercial dance world is a five-studio complex that extends over the entire 2300-square-foot third floor of a nondescript building on West 45th.  At Broadway Dance Center – BDC to those who train there – professional jazz and hip-hop dancers teach class, take class, hang out and tell each other about auditions. They stretch in the hallways and gossip as music from lyrical, ballet and hip-hop classes intermingle discordantly.

Inside Studio 1, Kelly Peters, a veteran hip-hop choreographer, is teaching a very complex, very fast combination to a group of 13 students, most of them dressed, like him, in baggy pants and old school sneakers in primary colors. Peters is using a song by Lil’ Wayne protégé Drake and, rather than choreograph to the song’s percussion, Peters has assigned a movement to each word of the lyrics. Many of the dancers are having trouble, both with the unfamiliar method of counting and with the speed. After they try the sequence to the music for the first time, they laugh and make self-deprecating jokes. As they run it and again, many resort to watching Peters do it while they “mark” the movements, that is, go through the routine mentally without fully extending the movements through their bodies.

Fuhrman, on the far side by the windows, is dancing full out every time. She doesn’t chat to the others when Peters pauses to re-cue the music. She ignores the sunlight slanting across her grey sweats and bare face, and ignores the BDC employee who comes into class to match the dancers against the names on the sign-in sheet.  Watching herself carefully in the mirror, Fuhrman does the movements again and again, getting them settled comfortably in her body.

When she dances, Fuhrman seems to be moving both more quickly and more slowly than the dancers around her. For every movement, her limbs travel impossibly fast at first and then slow down completely for the last few inches, hitting the shape she wants them to exactly in time to the music. She seems to be translating the song for her audience; watching her makes it easier to hear the layering of instruments and vocals. Lamont Smith, 25, one of the cofounders of the hip-hop company Urban Dance Alliance, puts it simply: “She can move.” Peters thinks so, too. He watches her in the mirror as she works through the routine. Part way through the class, he says, “I feel you on that, Kelsey. I feel you on that.”

When they talk about Fuhrman, other dancers and choreographers nearly always emphasize her dedication to self-improvement. “She’s always full-out,” said Shawndelle Stafford, 27, who dances with Fuhrman for the Urban Dance Alliance. Valerie Ho, a teacher at Broadway Dance Center (and a dancer who got one of the year’s most coveted jobs: a part in the upcoming movie Step Up 3), remembers when she found out Fuhrman was also working late nights at a bar.  “She wouldn’t get home ‘til 4 or 5 in the morning. The next day, she would get up and go to class and work out,” Ho says.  “A lot of kids who try to make it don’t know not just the work you have to put in, but the attitude you’ve got to have. You’ve got to go to class, and train up.”

Kathy Borchardt, who taught Fuhrman as a child in the dance studio in her basement in Fairmont, Minn, says Fuhrman was always hard working. “She was intense as a child. She never monkeyed around,” Borchardt says. “She was here to dance.”

Fuhrman is still here to dance, but being a commercial dancer means pairing dance ability with a marketable look. At times, the industry’s emphasis on appearance annoys her: “Sometimes in auditions, it’s ‘She’s gorgeous, and she can do a step touch, so we’ll work with her,’” she says. “It’s not about dance. To me there’s no passion about it.”

Even if she disagrees with the system, Fuhrman works hard to look the way she needs to book jobs.  After years of being blonde – she has a tattoo on her index finger that reads “Blondie” in cursive script — she died her hair dark red, and got a drastic cut to make herself look edgier. Fuhrman likes the new hair, but it was really a career move “With blondes, they always have that token blonde,” she says. “To me, being a longhaired blonde dancer get taken not seriously.” She has also ramped up her gym regime in the last few months. She now does a few miles on the treadmill and 20-30 laps in the pool every day before she heads to class or rehearsal.

For Furhman, and many dancers like her, a grueling schedule isn’t noteworthy at all. For her, going to the gym, rehearsing, and taking class in a single day is the normal routine. “I’m going to class because, if I just went to the gym and did running and swimming, I’d feel lazy,” she says.

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Fuhrman hasn’t always wanted to be hip-hop dancer. When she was seven, Fuhrman’s parents had to bribe her to get her in a dance class. She whined and protested when it was time for her father Scott, a life insurance salesman, to drive her the 20 miles through the country to jazz and tap classes. “The only way to get her in the car was a promise of a bag of Skittles and a can of Mountain Dew after class,” says Carol, a former social worker.

During junior high, Fuhrman realized she had some natural talent, and no longer needed the sugar to get her to dance classes. At Fuhrman’s junior prom, her date lost track of her and, after a few minutes, he noticed a group of students crowding around something on the dance floor. He pushed his way to the front of the crowd and found Fuhrman in the center of the circle, doing some of Jackson’s moves perfectly in her pink prom dress.

After high school, she moved to Manhattan to study musical theater at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, but quit after a year, and started expanding into other styles.  “When I did hip-hop, it just kind of felt right,” Furhman says.  “Even though I’m a white girl,” she adds with a grin.  Her training regime turned from technical ballet and jazz classes to street jazz and old school hip-hop basics like popping and locking.

Although she’s now focused on hip-hop, Fuhrman still does a wide variety of gigs.  She accepts many jobs in the hope that they might help her at some point in the future. Some, like the Macy’s industrial, are glorified go-go dancing. Others, involve very little choreography; she earns $250 to $300 a show dancing regularly for Sylvia Tosun, a moderately successful house singer now trying to cross into pop mainstream. Being a back-up dancer is sometimes frustating. For Tosun’s shows in Atlantic City, Montreal and throughout New Jersey and New York, Fuhrman does a lot of crowd hyping, and the music video for “Push n Pull” has no choreography at all.  But Fuhrman still persists; she’s hoping that a breakthrough for Tosun could translate into one for her as well.

It’s at underground events, not paid gigs, where choreographers and dancers showcase what they can do. Twice a year, New York hosts Carnival, a choreographer’s ball started in Los Angeles 11 years ago. At Hiro, a hangar-like ballroom on West 16th and Ninth Avenue, the crowd stands in small circles chatting, and grooving as they wait the show to start, and a few agents are sitting at the VIP tables to the right of the stage. Upstairs, the dancers are putting on makeup, reviewing choreography and joking around.  Fuhrman seems to know everyone. She’s jumping around, hugging friends, fixing her lipstick, going back over her counts. Every time the D.J. plays a song she likes, she throws her hands up in excitement and looks around for someone to dance with.

The dancers already saw the full show during the afternoon tech run, and it’s obvious which ones they like; during popular acts, everyone flocks to the balcony to watch and shout out their admiration. When it is her turn to dance, she hits each movement forcefully, looking out at the audience with intensity.

The night is about competitive camaraderie among the dancers, and no one mentions the agents downstairs. Earlier in the week, Fuhrman said, “That’s my main goal for 2010 to get signed — they’re the ones who tell you about big time auditions for mainstream acts.” But now, caught up in the enthusiasm of the underground scene that she also loves, she ignores them.

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It’s nine in the evening, a few days after Carnival and Fuhrman is at her apartment. She’s sitting on the couch, downloading music onto her laptop, a black and white cat named Nemo stretched out asleep on the carpet by her feet. She’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt and has a pint of Ben and Jerry’s cookies and cream ice cream waiting in the freezer. This is the first time in weeks that she has had nothing to do: no rehearsal or class to run to, no tables to serve, nothing to choreograph.

In these moments of stillness, she’s thinking about dance and trying to work out why she works herself so hard for it.  Why, when the very best she can hope for is to be a back-up dancer in someone else’s show.  Why, when even though she’s one of New York’s better hip-hoppers, she still has to wait tables three nights a week, using her training to weave gracefully between tables and balance trays of drinks.

She starts to speak a few times and then stops to think again. “Last night, I was on the train,” she finally says. “You know Rihanna’s song ‘Cry’? I just went through a tough breakup, and I was thinking it would make an amazing piece. Just take all the bullshit that he’s put me through and choreograph my feelings out.” She stops, unsure that the story said what she wanted it to. “When you’re onstage you get such an adrenaline rush. When you’re onstage, it feels like 30 seconds. But when you can take a class and it makes you cry, that’s when you know it means something to you. It’s not just about getting onstage.”

She warms to her theme and sits up straighter, suddenly sure of what she wants to say. “I would call myself a dancer because I just can’t stop doing it,” she says. “I can never stop moving.”

Paul Greengrass, the director of two Jason Bourne films and the recently released “Green Zone,” loves to pull us in close to the action. His thrillers changed the language of the genre—drawing us into claustrophobic, deeply intimate encounters and fights and jumbling our senses. His docudramas, “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93,” leave no terrible detail unfilmed as they bring two seminal historical tragedies to life. Yet watch the films together, and a pattern emerges. For all of his depth and skill, Greengrass chooses to focus on peoples’ actions far more than their thoughts, feelings or lives. Why is it that a director who brings us in so tightly when it comes to the horrors of life has, in all other ways, created an environment of such extreme emotional distance? In the Bourne series, this tendency didn’t matter too much. In “Green Zone,” though, it matters a great deal. The film represents Greengrass’ attempts to merge the popcorn of the Bourne series with the real-world focus of his two smaller docudramas. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that it also represents the troubling extreme of his inclination towards this kind of emotional chilliness, and it suggests that Greengrass needs to do some rethinking about his approach to filmmaking, and to step outside the box he has put himself in.

Paul Greengrass (Jasin Boland/Universal Studios)

Greengrass was a seemingly odd choice to take the helm of a major action franchise. Born in England, he made documentaries for English television for years before becoming a feature director. He had a scattered filmography, notable mostly for a little-noticed romantic comedy, “Theory of Flight,” and for his 2002 film “Bloody Sunday,” about the 1972 killings by British soldiers of protesters in Northern Ireland. That film is perhaps his best. In it, Greengrass pays homage to the great “Battle of Algiers” by maintaining a level of hyperrealism that compresses an entire history of conflict into a taut 105 minutes. More importantly, he shows his ability to keep the audience grounded in what is going on, even as pandemonium erupts on the screen, and to build tension layer by layer. The film cuts and cuts, from marchers to protesters throwing stones to the army in its bunker, and we watch as the crisis escalates with each cut. Yet we are never thrown into confusion, even when shots are flying through the sky and innocent marchers are killed in several different places, seemingly at once.
It’s no surprise that Greengrass was drawn to the Bloody Sunday tale. Since the beginning of the decade, he has focused completely on stories of terror and disaster, from the Derry killings to the 9/11 attacks in “United 93″—which filled me with such a sense of dread and horror that I never want to see it again—to the continual attempts by the entire world to hunt and murder Jason Bourne. The Greengrass landscape is unrelenting in its violence, its chaos and its heartbreak. You can count the moments of humor or tenderness on one hand. This is not a man who does love, unless you count love that comes to a terrible, violent end. A shrink might try to find the roots of this near total devotion to the bleak, but that is not really my place.
Indeed, Greengrass is not a man who really does people. His films clatter with life and with action, but the characters racing through them are there primarily to drive the plot forward. It’s a somewhat strange conclusion to reach, because, nearly to a movie, they are well acted and emotionally affecting. “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93,” especially, are shattering. “United 93” was made for $15 million, and it is just as accomplished as “Bloody Sunday” in its ability to bring the trauma of that day to life without being exploitative or emotionally hollow.
Still, it is easy to rouse sentiment you are dealing with such events. Half of what makes the films so draining is that we know what is going to happen before the people onscreen do. Greengrass is playing with very loaded days, the kinds that imprint themselves irreparably on our conscious. And as excellent as “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93” are, they should not be taken as films that attempt to capture fully fledged human beings living their lives. Both are snapshots of one traumatic, jumbled and momentous day. Anything we learn about, for instance, the organizers and young Irish rebels of  “Bloody Sunday” is less important than the events that surround them. Their emotions overwhelmingly fall on the negative side of the ledger—anger, fear, grief, pain. But we know far less about them than what is happening to them. This does not make these films any weaker, though. There is a place for this kind of clipped approach to storytelling, and attempting to winnow the events of September 11th or Bloody Sunday into a two-hour film seems like that place.
The Bourne films aren’t too concerned with giving us full-fledged portraits either. Again, this is mostly not a problem. “The Bourne Supremacy,” the first film in the series that Greengrass directed, felt revelatory when it opened in 2004. Here was a movie that didn’t skimp on hair-raising fights and chases, but also managed to be intelligent and emotionally resonant. It immediately placed him squarely in the cultural consciousness. He followed it up with “United 93,” and then “The Bourne Ultimatum.” “Ultimatum” is one of the best films about torture and the surveillance state I’ve ever seen, and it makes its points with subtlety and power; the politics were important, but the movie still swings. Just as crucially, it—along with “The Bourne Supremacy”—is one of the few action thrillers made in recent years that actually thrills. Yet, as in Greengrass’ docudramas, there are few instances of three-dimensional characterization to be found in these films. Matt Damon makes Bourne a kind of walking ghost, shut down except for the bewildering flashes of violence that leaps from his subconscious. Almost all of the other characters are either apparatchiks or allies—obstacles for Bourne to surmount or friends who pop up and disappear just as quickly. It’s clearly a deliberate choice on the part of the filmmakers, and, as in the docudramas, it’s one we accept. There is so much more to see, and so much skill to admire, that these questions don’t trouble us.
When it was announced that Greengrass would be filming “Green Zone,” then, it was easy to get excited. Who better to breathe life into what has historically been a troubled sub-genre, plagued by mediocre output and little attention? I am speaking, of course, of the Iraq War film—as depressing and complicated a subject around, and a minefield for many gifted filmmakers. Well, “Green Zone” is here. It’s only slightly pompous in places, and it’s refreshingly anti-war, but it’s also a bad film, and it shows how Greengrass’ style is starting to lead him astray.
I am not the first to note that “Green Zone,” which is very, very loosely based on a book by journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran, seems in many ways like an extension of the Bourne films, but everything that made that series kick, that made it feel visceral and urgent, makes “Green Zone” plod along confusedly. All of the elements that Greengrass has worked with so successfully here bog the film down and leave us with nothing to latch onto.
Just like Bourne, Damon’s character in “Green Zone”—we don’t know his first name; people just bark “Miller” at him instead—is a lonely man on a lonely mission, cutting through vast swaths of bureaucratic lies to get at the truth (in this case, the lack of any WMD’s in Iraq). But Miller is so ephemeral he almost disappears. This is a man with seemingly no history, family or interest beyond searching through the swiftly deepening quicksand of the Iraqi quagmire. It’s economical storytelling taken ludicrously far. Perhaps Greengrass and his screenwriter Brian Helgeland wanted to immerse us completely in the present tense, but Miller is so opaque we quickly stop caring about him. There’s no one to pick up the slack, either. Everyone, from the journalist played by an underutilized Amy Ryan (as usual, this war film has very little time for women) to the Iraqi who helps Miller on his quest, played by Khalid Abdalla, is similarly adrift, conversing only in platitudes and plot points. We get the sense that, once again, the vastness of the war, and the continuing controversy surrounding even its tiniest details, has overwhelmed Greengrass.
The plot—centering around Miller’s continually fruitless search for the weapons, and his growing realization that the government has lied about their existence, and a shadowy group of Saddam’s former henchmen—takes precedence over the characters. Even the action sequences are listless and predictable, filled with military shootouts and trips in and out of houses. Whereas Greengrass’ earlier work left us exhilarated, “Green Zone” leaves us bored.
Why have Greengrass’ gifts escaped him this time? To answer that, it’s important to look at the ways “Green Zone” departs from his previous work. It is the first time he’s made a film based on a true story that doesn’t scrupulously recreate the details of a single day. In “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93,” he was able to rely on the forward momentum of seminal moments in history. Neither film tells us anything we didn’t already know; the events of 9/11 have been raked over more than just about any other day imaginable Maybe this is why he loses the previously unerring sense of control he’s had. Left without an anchor, “Green Zone” simply drowns.
The question that arises, though, is this: what’s holding Greengrass—and, by extension, Helgeland and Damon—back? Damon is an accomplished actor; surely he can bring more to these roles than he currently does. To be sure, I’m not suggesting that these people should be randomly saddled with love stories or extemporaneous, “revelatory” details. Yet, ultimately, we require something more than plot. In “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93,” Greengrass was protected by the sacred nature of the events he was recreating and by the sheer level of hysteria and tragedy onscreen. In the Bourne films, he was protected by the dazzle of the fights and the chases and the intricate web of mystery he created. In “Green Zone,” though, he has none of those things to work with and, consequently, everything falls apart. The failure of “Green Zone” suggests that Greengrass might try attempting other kinds of films. He has been unerring in his focus over the past decade, and “Green Zone” is perhaps a fitting way to shift gears and begin telling smaller stories that feature three-dimensional people.